Since the Industrial Revolution, there has been the pervasive fear of losing one’s job to a machine. The original Luddites were opposed to technology for precisely this reason, and the original “saboteurs” were known to throw their wooden shoes (sabots) into machinery in protest. Ever since, at least once a generation, this fear pops back up again—especially since the advent of computers. (And if an episode of Star Trek: The Original Series is to be believed, it will continue well into the 23rd century.)

In the printing industry, however, we have the opposite problem. No one need worry about being replaced by a machine; we are turning to machines because we can’t find people to begin with.

There has been much talk over the past half dozen or so years about “automation,” and if you ask five people what they mean by “automation,” you’ll get five different responses. Nine times out of 10, automation is used to refer to some kind of software that automatically processes files for production, generates estimates on-the-fly, or otherwise adds efficiencies to the production process.