Will There Always Be a Human Factor?

Anytime there is a person in the loop there will always be a human factor, no matter how small.

The person doing the computing is a human factor.

The 'optimal' settings will only be as clever as the guy who wrote the algorithm, they may well be pretty good and doubtless faster than a human operator, you can't prove they are optimal though, unless you can test every other possible setting.
You are only ever as good as the information programmed in. Maybe the machine manufacturer has too big a safety margin, maybe the cutting speed could be faster? What do you mean by optimal? Optimal for tool wear or process speed. What do we mean by 'what do we mean'
And if course when it screws up (not if) it will need intervention to prvent it blithely proceeding to machine with a tool which has lost it's tip due to hitting a defect in the part it was machining.
Can I stop now? I jus' realised I dunno what I talkin' about cos' I only a cat.
Baaaad kitty
Del

This is just a small example of the larger issue of automated manufacturing.

Machinery and digital control is great for achieving repeatability in the fabrication process. But who thinks that consistency is desirable? We do. The machines don't care. My point is that the desire to write an algorithm that could set up tools without human guidance is a human desire. We have been pretty good at teaching machines to perform repeatable tasks, so this might be another one that can be mechanized. But the only reason we would do it would be to optimize the process.

If eliminating human input in this procedure resulted in inferior products, then a push to do it this way would signify some intention that wasn't very rational.

This question evokes issues that go beyond considerations about what is good engineering practice. Engineers are part of the human race, and they also have to live with the social consequences of the products and processes that they design. If someone is trying to automate a process just so they can fire more workers, that action becomes anti-human. So, while the human factor can never be escaped, it can be corrupted.

At a philosophical level, the human factor is the creativity, the art if you like.
Nor will a machine have that leap of intuition or evn counter-intuition, the lateral thinking that completely removes a process from the operation by doing something apparently daft.
Del

If you think of every part of a process as being a link in a chain, the human will be the weak link. If anything is going to go wrong, that's where it will go wrong.