We can automate the production of spare parts, but that may not mean much. Look at something as simple as a door. You can buy a door without hinges, cut mortices for it, and hang it in place. Most people instead buy pre-hung doors. The time saved installing the door frame piecemeal is worth the cost of buying a whole manufactured assembly. Yes, some things can easily be replaced. A battery can easily be swapped out if a device is built to allow it. But most components can’t be so easily replaced. And usually it’s not possible to design a device to have every part easily serviceable. You are vastly understating the time and difficulty of repairing things.
Think about the early 20th century, when consumer electronics were simple and designed to be repaired. In that world, most people still didn’t do their own repairs. Most people took their broken devices to repair shops. Even if you have access to spare parts, it takes a lot of time to repair something even as simple as a radio. It took enough effort that it made sense for people to specialize in it and make it their career.
And this will only continue in the future. Automation makes human labor more valuable, not less. Our capabilities to do things increases, but the bottleneck is always human labor. And the more we can produce, the more value those scarce human labor hours have. Unless you can automate the entire repair process, increased automation will make us more likely to throw things away.
And worse, automation makes it easier just to start from scratch. You can always take a broken device, throw it in a crucible with a mountain of other broken devices, and just melt the whole lot down. And automation also gives us cheaper energy, as it makes it cheaper to install ever-more solar panels and batteries.
Pierre121000@lemmy.ml 3 days ago
Bad example i.m.o. since when the hinge break they don’t buy a new door(whole), but swap the broken hinge(part) for a new one.
Good example in the case of DIY though, since the hassle may not be worth the time spent.
Every module in my computer, mouse, keyboard, screen, or, i.d.k., lamp torch, can be easily replaced with a screwdriver.
Even phones could be made easy to open. If you have a counter-example in mind to « unless when the part is difficult to access, which doesn’t seem to be an engineering necessity in most cases ? » written above, then i’m interested.
But opening it and swapping the spare part(, well, welding it back then,) took less than 5mns.
What took a long time was opening it without breaking anything since it was fragile, with parts glued together. Radios were more complex than nowadays.
And they didn’t stop at swapping the spare part apparently, but ran a full diagnostic because other parts aged as well and, e.g., a shorted transistor could overheat a transformer.
To me, it seems like asking for an individual to repair his watch himself by getting a spare part, these are the kind of situations that should be done by pros. But then even if it takes many hours we’re not talking about a 20€ product, so it’s usually worth it to repair instead of buying a new one(, which is why people repaired them instead of buying new ones).
Other examples could include houses or cars, which are repaired because buying new ones wouldn’t be worth it.
But the example of the radio still goes in my direction, because back it was difficult to swap the spare parts and yet people still went through the trouble of repairing it.
How much more would it then be pertinent for objects that are thrown away while a pro could easily swap the spare part in 5mns(, or an individual do it h.er.im.self).
You’re saying that more human labor would be required to swap a part than to build the whole product, and i disagree 🤷
I even think that less human labor would be required to swap a part than to build it.
Many humans will be involved with the production process, which starts from mining and end with selling.
Not easier to build the whole than the part
Not really :)