More work can be done by machines instead of hands. Is it true or false?

The past century has seen that machines are widely applied in many domains as to industry and agriculture. While some people, who claim that returning to the natural states is the most suitable lifestyle, criticize the mechanization, I personally believe that machines have brought advantages that outweigh the drawbacks overall as well as my threefold reasons in this easy.

First of all, it is an undeniable fact that mechanization has contributed to enrich the material needs for the entire society due to the increasing production efficiency along with the reducing production cost, both caused by machinery. If various machines had not been invented, we would have to culture foodstuffs and make furniture manually, which is seemingly what happened hundreds of years ago and is obviously inconvenient. Furthermore, manufacturing products by machines instead of hands benefits individuals, for instance, declining workers’ labor intensities and minimizing the detrimental impacts from hazardous jobs. Last but not least, mechanization releases people from reproducing the same products repeatedly. Thus, people can pay more attention to productive and technological innovations rather than meaningless copying, which are regarded as the core power of progress in many successful companies like Apple, Microsoft and Google.

Nevertheless, mechanized production has a great deal of merits, manual skills remain useful functions in some sectors in order to maintain the high and unique qualities. The salient example is the production of the Swiss watches.

By way of conclusion, I reaffirm my position that mechanization is superior to handwork; however, reserving traditional handy technologies as human heritages is pretty wise as well.

(7th September, 2011)

I am not sure of the word mechanization it may be mechanisms.

We used to be able to do a lot more for ourselves though all of these mechanical things have allowed us to become lazy. We used to be able to walk wherever we needed to go now we use cars. We used to build things like the Great Wall of China and the pyramids now no one can do that without machines.