The Future of Manufacturing

Consider life before the start of the industrial revolution and compare it to now. How many hours per week would you need to work, considering all our advances in manufacturing, to achieve that same standard of living as back then? My guess is only a few.  Yet interestingly people are as busy today as they were back then.  When you consider all the advanced manufacturing and automation that has developed, it is odd that we are still so busy.

Now let’s think about the future.  The thinking is that even higher levels of automation are coming.  The current trend in advanced manufacturing is that even more decisions will be made by machines reducing the reliance on humans for repetitive manual tasks but now increasingly for decision making and problem solving. The pace at which this is occurring is increasing rapidly.  I think this will place considerable burden on our social systems and we need to be prepared to discuss this.