Working in my father’s machine tool shop taught me a similar thing about “dark” factories, lights-out shifts, and so on. For a few hundred dollars you can put a hopper after a machine and now it can process an entire bar of raw stock over 1-2 hours before a human has to tend it. For a few tens of thousands of dollars you can put a bar feeder before a machine and now it can process a half dozen bars of raw stock over 8-10 hours before a human has to tend to it. The next level is some kind of inter-machine logistics or automated packing - I would guess that would be in the hundreds of thousands of dollars range, bespoke, and call for a per-factory installation. Most importantly, this is the point where it’s cheaper to hire a human to do it.
Many factories will use bar feeders to run their machines overnight, but going further with automation doesn’t get enough return on investment.
Exactly. The human has the flexibility to do many different things even though they're inferior to the robots at any given thing. Most operations aren't at a scale where every task involved is done at sufficient volume that having a single-purpose machine to do it is worthwhile. Rather, the machines chip away at the edges, allowing the human to more and more do what they're superior at: flexibility.
It's the same thing we see with eternal claims of being able to do things without software developers--the tools chip away at the edge to a huge degree, but what they're really doing is mostly taking away the repetitive scutwork of the job, leaving us coders to do the part that takes the thinking. The building blocks I assemble these days are much bigger than when I started but the fundamental nature of the job of distilling requirements into useful directions to the computer is unchanged.
>Many factories will use bar feeders to run their machines overnight, but going further with automation doesn’t get enough return on investment.
As a rule, yes, but I say it depends on how you measure ROE and what that human costs.
In situations where there's a collective agreement in place and you have to pay that labourer $50K/year + benefits (NTTAWWT), you get more wiggle room to make your case for retooling.
Another case is when I've worked for bigger manufacturers where there were some of us on site just in case we were needed and our salaries were part of facilities overhead.
We were paid no matter what and could do what we liked as long as production was running smoothly and our minor, secondary duties were being handled. In this time (~4hr/day) we could scheme or tinker to our heart's content.
Jobber shops (a.k.a. the real world) were a different matter ...
