This article completely misses the point.<p>Places like China assemble stuff by hand that would be automated in higher wage countries not because they don't know how, or higher wage countries have developed some new software they haven't. It's because wage costs are low. As soon as it makes economical sense to automate, companies do. It's not specific to geography, or technology, or anything of other than economics of thr world labor market.
> “Thirty years from now we will laugh at our generation of humans, putting products together by hand,”<p>I never laughed at humans thirty years ago even if they were programming on antiquated machines with only megabytes of RAM over dialup internet connections. As a matter of fact, I think some of them are legends and we should try to emulate them.<p>I don't know why humans thirty years from now will laugh at us, even if it happens that robots do more of the jobs we do take for granted.
These articles are written by people who have no idea what they are talking about and have never built anything, much less anything in the physical world before.
<a href="https://archive.is/Zt9oI" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://archive.is/Zt9oI</a><p>Much of this discussion is swallowed up in two differing definitions of "design." They contrast chip design with leafblower design. Chips are very fussy and require lots of patience and intellect to be useful to people, while the latter's success is more rooted in the aesthetics, ergonomics, user needs of everyday families. This isn't saying they're wrong, just a sloppy way to talk about it.<p>What they're really saying is the path from CAD to CAM is shorter than ever, and more integrated. It sounds pretty great. It does make me curious about where the tooling cost outstretches the gap between family and factory owner. Probably making lots of Temu-grade consumer goods, such as a disposable lawn mower, or a coffee maker that's good for 6 months. Which is of course horrific for long-term ecology. It would be nice to see this amount of cleverness directed at extracting usable materials from landfills :) :) :)
This is a weird jump.<p>Usually technology bumps out the lowest class workers, but genAI is taking a bite right out of the middle to upper class... certain executives, office salespeople, some programmers, actors, and such will be replaced by robots before garbage workers, lawn services or roofers.
Give robot a box of Ikea furniture. Even when it is designed by computer and most of the pieces are built by CNC machines (technically robots) I don't think that there is any robot in the world, which will be able to build the furniture together.
The economist is approaching this with the same outright hubris that Elon Musk did with his factory automation.<p>Years later the Tesla manufacturing lines seem to be going backwards on precision and reliability.
“Thirty years from now we will laugh at our generation of humans, putting products together by hand,”<p>I guess people never thought the titanic would sink, or Japan would be going backwards (they have robots), but here we are.