> does the tooling augment a human, or is the tooling sold to replace a human?
It's bizarre on HN of all places, given its connection to the tech industry and the history of tools sold by that industry, that someone would imagine these are mutually exclusive options.
As is often the case with tech industry tools, the tool in fact augments a human, and is (often) sold to replace a human. That's barely even a superficial contradiction -- enhancing the productivity of each human doing a task, from the perspective of consumer of the kind of human labor involved that is making short-term decisions around a fixed amount of needed output -- replaces some share of those humans rather directly. (On a broader analysis, this is often not true, because it also expands the market for the kind of work it augments by reducing the price per unit output to the point where more marginal uses become viable, but the individual existing purchaser of output often isn't concerned with that.)
The one liner above is an adoption of a significant question asked by the inventor of the computer mouse, Doug Englebart. Doug spend decades in tech and is the man in the "Put this, there" demo, which changed technology history. Doug's audience was sometimes Defense through the Stanford-area. Teams and communication were his everyday world.
It's bizarre on HN of all places, given its connection to the tech industry and the history of tools sold by that industry, that someone would imagine these are mutually exclusive options.
As is often the case with tech industry tools, the tool in fact augments a human, and is (often) sold to replace a human. That's barely even a superficial contradiction -- enhancing the productivity of each human doing a task, from the perspective of consumer of the kind of human labor involved that is making short-term decisions around a fixed amount of needed output -- replaces some share of those humans rather directly. (On a broader analysis, this is often not true, because it also expands the market for the kind of work it augments by reducing the price per unit output to the point where more marginal uses become viable, but the individual existing purchaser of output often isn't concerned with that.)