Comment by nebula8804
21 hours ago
There is a demographic implosion coming soon. You look at a video like this and count how many humans there are to make this $20-30 speaker and you realize that this $20 speaker is not going to be automated, its just going to go away as an option.
Lots of that design can be fairly easily automated: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hwzz-96WliU. And that's without all the "fancy" robotics like arms and so on that is only dropping in price and rising in usability.
Factory automation design as a service is already a huge sector but it can get a lot bigger. Of course the capital barrier to entry to standing up a factory for some widget will go up, but the unit price might not. It remains to be seen how far into the low-end, low-volume, high-SKU-count that process will reach. Maybe things like standard-ish robotic cells will allow agility in the factory. If being able to make one-off parts in a highly data-driven factory is Industry 4.0, maybe that's Industry 5.0!
Presumably it will become less possible to spin up production of, say, a whole new design of a speaker in a few days with some new tasks for the workers and some rejigging of basic machines, but it sounds like a sector that will see some interesting progress in the next 50 years.
Thats a nice video, thanks for sharing. Everything shown there is old school automation of which China has a whole ecosystem for years. ALso they did they deliberately show only 1-3 steps of the process? Wheres the rest of the speaker? My video showed the speaker production from magnet to packaged box. I'm not convinced that there is a cost advantage yet since all of that technology shown existed in spades for years and yet my modern video shows people are still making speakers by hand. But it is making me think that maybe they can pull it off eventually. (Maybe the US can as well)
India will gladly accept those factories for a few decades.
If that's true then why hasn't India changed government policy to make it a more attractive location for manufacturing?
Because of socialism, go look at how its two socialist (and most industrial states) treat capital investment!
>Population implosion
Still fail to see evidence of that. I wouldnt go around making such a huge blanket statement, without even london horse manure crisis level evidence.
Here's the evidence. Not a sudden implosion but a slow decline that will particularly impact the younger population groups who have typically done most of the manual labor in factories.
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2022/12/05/key-facts...