An Amazon warehouse or Tesla factory tour would likely change your mind.
I had to do both of these in the last year and not a lot of humans around…
Wouldn’t that just be “ionized”?
Libraries are typically either governed by a municipality's rules around employment and treatment of employees, or part of a school/etc where there are again additional guidelines about these things to be sensible and not leading people into unsafe behavior.
This is over the last decade at one of the largest automakers in the world. Naturally there is significant variation between individual lines and plants; some are newer and more automated, some are older and much less automated. Are some cars being built on more automated lines? Yes. But a great many, probably the vast majority, are being built with fairly low assembly* automation.
* There is a significant split in automation between "body weld" stages and "assembly" stages. Body weld is very heavily automated basically everywhere (although there are some surprising exceptions in places), while assembly is much less automated.
Agreed, and hence I suggested an amazon warehouse tour (they offer one for their flagship robotics 'research' warehouse) to anyone, or a Tesla factory tour (might need to talk to someone, fairly manageable).
This reminds me of the quote, "the future is already here – it's just not very evenly distributed."
> I can’t imagine this would bring much actual experience with this new generation of robotics.
Luckily for you, my job has always been within the robotics research side of the company, so I am very much aware of the strengths and weaknesses of the current technology.
Ford isn't a tech company, they don't even make their own robots. They buy them from someone else. What... positive experience do you have to assume that one of the lowest-tech industries in existence is somehow giving experience with some of the most advanced tech in the world?
Indeed, Ford. Leaving aside the "old school" six axis robots that have been around for decades, Ford absolutely uses UR10s collaborating with humans to sand the entire car body in about 30 seconds, and to fit shock absorbers. They're also used at the engine plants. They also use the Symbio platform for transmission assembly, and fully autonomous forklift robots throughout their Tennessee plant.
Things have been moving pretty fast in the last year when it comes to semi-bipedal robots doing the long tail of previously unreachable tasks.