Future of Manufacturing

It  is probably true that production line manufacture is not going to employ hundreds of school leavers with general skills in the way it did until perhaps half a century ago. A modern factory is full of semi- or fully automatic machines that do all the mundane stuff like putting screws in, packing things in boxes etc, that once was manual unskilled labour. 

That said, the development of products, and the setting up of those production lines, very much needs people, but it needs people with the right mix of skills, and the manufacture or customization of anything in small quantities (at relatively high cost) remains intensively manual, as there is a break even between the development cost and the cost to automate production.
  
As an example 20 years ago when I was involved in mobile phone production, when such things were made in Europe,  lines that made a new one every 15 seconds*, ran for 2 or 3 months non-stop and were then dismantled and re-configured for the next new model that had been developed while that was going on. 
 
About half the factory cost of each handset was sunk cost for all the development that took place prior to that point that was very much manual to produce the first  few 100 units the hard way.
Its not a new idea, and  not all areas of production are quite so racy at the cutting edge, and a lot of management models are not a good fit to it. 

There will be things like the production of the relatively few moulds you need for plastic injection that are simply never worth fully automating, but look shockingly expensive.

There are things that are likely to remain hard to automate - repairs for example, or farming with plants where every one is different, but with machine vision this can be partly done already. (when some one makes a robot that can drive to someone's house, diagnose and fix a blocked toilet and drive back again, I'll revisit that statement.)

Around AI is a lot of hype and bluster,  but increasingly having 'machines doing stuff', regardless of  if the software is really AI or not, is likely to remain the trend.

Mike.

* which meant that every process step had to take a multiple of 15 seconds - if it took longer, the task was subdivided until it didn't, or the line forked into parallel streams and then re-merged. 

Hello Mike:

If you look at the videos showing production lines that were used recently in China for making phones it wasn't too different from what was used 20 years ago.They just made the phones in much greater numbers.

As you are aware phones are designed to be assembled in a predetermined set order _put screws A then B  in then move to the next station.

Current manufacturing in China is in crisis, with large number of factories closing and large layoffs of low wage jobs, due to lack of orders.

Peter

Hello Mike:

If you look at the videos showing production lines that were used recently in China for making phones it wasn't too different from what was used 20 years ago.They just made the phones in much greater numbers.

As you are aware phones are designed to be assembled in a predetermined set order _put screws A then B  in then move to the next station.

Current manufacturing in China is in crisis, with large number of factories closing and large layoffs of low wage jobs, due to lack of orders.

Peter