One of the most useful manufacturing concepts ever invented was the idea of interchangeable parts. It was (depending on who you ask) first used by Eli Whitney for the manufacture of rifles. Before interchangeable parts, each rifle was essentially a custom job, built by hand. The main pieces would be largely the same, but there was no guarantee that a trigger on one rifle would fit properly on another, or that the barrel of one would rest properly in the stock of another, etc. As a result, guns were slow to produce and to repair.

The money idea behind interchangeable parts is standardization. And the benefit of standardization is that it removes thought and judgment from the process. Instead of figuring out how to repair a rifle, you just remove the broken part and put in an identical one. Instead of having one assembled by a knowledgeable craftsman, you can give the basic instructions and the pile of parts to unskill laborers. Instead of having each piece carved by hand, you can have hundreds pumped out by dumb machines. Standardization takes intelligence out of the process of creation and moves it back a level, into deciding how the process of creation should work. Once the design of a rifle is completed, and the proper castings are forged, everything that remains is a dumb process, provided things run smoothly. You know longer need to understand how a gun works to be able to repair or assemble one.

So perhaps it’s more accurate to say that rather than intelligence being removed, standardized parts come with intelligence preinstalled.