The share of the operative workman in the machine industry is (typically) that of an attendant, an assistant, whose duty it is to keep pace with the machine process and to help out with workmanlike manipulation at points where the machine process engaged is incomplete.[139] His work supplements the machine process, rather than makes use of it. On the contrary the machine process makes use of the workman. The ideal mechanical contrivance in this technological system is the automatic machine. Perfection in the machine technology is attained in the degree in which the given process can dispense with manual labour; whereas perfection in the handicraft system means perfection of manual workmanship. It is the part of the workman to know the working of the mechanism with which he is associated and to adapt his movements with mechanical accuracy to its requirement. This demands a degree of intelligence, and much of this work calls for a good deal of special training besides; so that it is still true that the workman is useful somewhat in proportion as he is skilled in the occupation to which the machine industry calls him. In the new era the stress falls rather more decidedly on general intelligence and information, as contrasted with detail mastery of the minutiæ of a trade; so that familiarity with the commonplace technological knowledge of the time is rather more imperative a requirement under the machine technology than under that of handicraft. At the same time this common stock of technological information is greatly larger in the current state of the industrial arts; so much larger in volume, and at the same time so much more exacting in point of accuracy and detail, that this commonplace information that is requisite to any of the skilled occupations can no longer be acquired in the mere workday routine of industry, but is to be had only at the cost of deliberate application and with the help of schools.