Manpower: the unit of measure of automation

I wrote a Tweet and I wanted to expound upon it a bit:


I'd like to propose a unit of measure: the # of humans a robot would replace. Similar to horsepower for cars, we call it, say, manpower (mp)

You strict mathematical types might be thinking, "So is this a unit of power? Are you going to set an arbitrary amount, much like James Watt had to do with horsepower? What's the point of declaring this?" The answers are 1) sort of, and 2) not really, and 3) to phrase the oncoming automation apocalypse into modes of speaking and thinking that we can grasp.

So, is this a unit of power? Sort of. Power is work over time, for certain definitions of work. We could break work down further into force over distance, and so on from there. Here the similarities between horsepower and "manpower" ends. The purpose of creating the term "horsepower" was to create a comparison between the power it took for a horse to pull something (a cart, a plow, etc) and compare it to that same straight-line motion that a machine could duplicate. In this way, horsepower was a unit of measure on par with any other. We could, in the strictest sense, use manpower the same way - by measuring how many people are required to pull a cart of a plow, and substitute the equal amount of mechanical muscle.

However, this mental exercise is to address automation, so let's say, instead of equating work to moving an object in a straight line, we take the broader meaning of work: whatever a person does in an 8 hour day or 40 hour week. And, since manpower is going to be termed a more general "work" over time, we can use this rate to compare automation to human endeavors, the same way autos were compared to horses by creating a unit of measure that clearly illustrated the transition.

So, you working at your job is 1mp.

If a robot "does the work of ten men", it would have 10mp.

If a robot replaced 1 full-time worker but operated constantly (24/7/365), it would have ~4.2 mp ((24 hr day/8 hr day) * (365 days per year for a robot / ~261 work days per year for a person)).

Hopefully you can see how this would ease the presentation and calculation of automation replacement as we go forward.

If someone has already thought of this concept (and I am quite certain someone probably already has), please point it to me so I can read further on it, and possibly add links to that material as well.