Welcome back to the deep dive.
You know for decades, we have been living with this almost mythical yet entirely unfulfilled promise, the fully automated factory.
The so-called lights-out operation where human hands are replaced by, well, tireless mechanical precision.
But this vision, it has consistently bumped up against a very costly reality,
often resulting in a manufacturing floor that felt less like a technological marvel
and more like a frustrating expensive mess.
And that tension, that gap between the promise and the, well, the painful reality,
that's exactly what this stack of sources we've collected today is designed to analyze.
that's exactly what this stack of sources we've collected today is designed to analyze.
We're looking at a history of some pretty spectacular automation failures,
the surprisingly low global saturation of robotics even today,
and most critically, the technical breakthrough that is finally turning this dream into a near-term inevitability.
And that breakthrough is advanced industrial software, what we're calling the digital brain.
Okay, so let's unpack this.
And to really understand the inflection point we're at today,
I think we have to start with the most famous and maybe the most embarrassing anecdote
of corporate automation hubris from the 1980s.
The year is 1985, General Motors was feeling the heat from hyper-efficient Japanese automakers,
and the GM chairman Roger Smith, he was convinced the solution was total automation.
He had just returned from a demonstration absolutely buoyant and he shared his astonishment with the press.