[rdcbn1]

One has to ask - why are dark factories being built in China where low cost labor is abundant but not in the United States where labor is not cheap when dark factories could help rebuild the US industrial base.

[T-Bird45]

I’ve seen a couple of machining outfits make this claim but it still required the workpiece to be precisely fixtured for machining. I didn’t observe that being done only by robots - it did involve human labor. Of course, this was before widespread AI & early in the advent of IoT.

[Red Badger]

The factory of the future will have just two beings: a Man and a dog.

The dog will be there to make sure the man doesn’t touch the machines. The man will be there to feed the dog..............- Warren Bennis

[Scrambler Bob]

Dark Factory?

Dare they call it a Black Factory, it IS kind of like slavery, of machines.

[OneVike]

We have arrived early.



check out the music video here. In The year 2525

[Telepathic Intruder]

When robots can make other robots like themselves using only raw materials, we’re in trouble. Probably before then, but this means they don’t even need us anymore.

[Zathras]

Semiconductor fabs have been automated for decades and never sleep.

[plain talk]

No surprise. Most of us have seen this coming. Young people will need to acquire skills more difficult to mechanize and automate.

[doorgunner69]

Dark factories

Sounds raciss, must keep negros in there or something nefarious.

[Carry_Okie]

There have been lights out factories since the 1990s. Allen Bradley had one of the first.

[EnderWiggin1970]

As others have pointed out this is a good way for America to overcome labor cost issues in competition with low-wage countries. A true zero-human factory may never be a reality, but we can keep incrementally taking steps in this direction.

In the electronics factory where I spent most of my career the workers on the floor weren't interacting much with the parts being built. It was more a case of supporting the machines - reloading reels of components, doing daily and weekly maintenance, checking settings and updating them for different product mixes and so on. Inspections that were manual early in my career were all automated (and much more reliable) by the end, and end of line assembly processes were steadily more automated. I could see the human handling that was still done for end of line testing being eliminated with a bit of fixturing and robotics.

Technicians would still be needed to support all this, and to do the awkward and involved maintenance and repair activities that are required to keep everything running. But we are reaching a stage where any kind of repetitive motion a human can make in a manufacturing process, can be replicated with robotics.