Can fully automated production lines completely replace sweatshops?

Fully automated production lines have gone through several generations. The first generation of fully automated lines is purely mechanical. To illustrate, imagine you and someone else standing side by side, both blindfolded. You reach out to hand over a nut, while the other person, without checking, simply screws a bolt downward — and by sheer design, it perfectly matches and fits into the nut you are holding. Even though both of you are blindfolded, you’re both made of steel and iron, so this reaching and screwing action can be repeated a hundred thousand times without a single mistake. Your position for handing over the nut precisely matches the spot where the bolt is inserted, down to the millimeter.

The problem arises when you get “tired” — for example, if one of your belts ages and loosens, or a bearing wears out, causing your handoff position to shift by just one millimeter. Then it all falls apart: the bolt won’t screw in properly, or it will strip the threads, leading to a batch of defective products. At this point, maintenance is needed — someone has to constantly replace your six belts and four bearings, ensuring that at least two bearings and three belts are always functioning properly so you can continue making precise movements. Alternatively, adjustments can be made, like tightening your belts or increasing the step size of your stepper motor to compensate for the wear and alignment errors. This way, the production line can keep running, though it demands a lot of maintenance and fine-tuning.

There are tricks and strategies to reduce maintenance costs, such as setting up three identical lines and cycling consumables between them. For instance, new belts go to the first line; once they loosen beyond tolerance, they’re swapped to the second line, and then to the third line. This way, the lifespan of consumables is maximized, and maintenance complexity is reduced — though, of course, this requires having multiple lines in operation.

The second generation builds upon the first by adding automatic detection and feedback systems. Sensors are installed at key connection points to measure whether actions are precise. If alignment is low, the system automatically instructs the motor to turn an extra 15 degrees, raising your hand a bit higher. If it’s moving too slowly, it tightens the belts to increase acceleration. If compensation fails, the faulty product is immediately ejected from the line and marked as defective, preserving downstream capacity. If the defect rate climbs too high, engineers are alerted for manual intervention. This significantly reduces maintenance pressure.

However, up to this point, the line still fundamentally relies on “carefully orchestrated coincidences.” Each station doesn’t even “know” about the next — if you don’t hand over a nut, the bolt station will still perform its screwing action at the designated position regardless. Normal operation depends entirely on an engineer who designed your station to align perfectly with the next one. As such, these automated lines still heavily rely on skilled engineers for design and maintenance, making them impractical for small batch production. A smarter approach is to build semi-automated lines, where tasks requiring high precision, complexity, and flexibility are handled by human-operated stations. Humans, with their judgment and adaptability, can bridge the gaps in difficult-to-coordinate steps, achieving a balance between flexibility, reliability, and efficiency.

Now we are at the dawn of the third generation of fully automated production lines. What’s special about this generation? Specific workstations are now equipped with intelligent nodes — usually multi-joint robotic arms with ultra-high degrees of freedom, real-time sensor feedback, and autonomous decision-making capabilities. These robots “understand” their task — for instance, “my job is to screw this bolt into these holes.” If the previous step is slightly misaligned, the robot will adjust its actions to compensate. It can handle such variations to the point where the prior step doesn’t need to precisely place a nut at a fixed spot — just toss it roughly into a frame, and the robot will use vision and sensors to pick it up with one hand and tighten the bolt with the other. By relying on its own intelligence, it eliminates instability in the process and significantly extends maintenance intervals.

For the factory, the main task becomes scheduling regular “shift changes” for the robots. After a shift, the robots autonomously drive themselves to maintenance stations for service — swapping out transmissions, changing oil, etc. These tasks don’t even have to be performed by factory staff; they can be handled by on-site engineers from the robot supplier.

Starting from this generation, fully automated lines can truly replace human labor — and profitably so. The same set of robots can be reconfigured to produce different products much faster than the previous generations of lines and almost as quickly as training a new team of workers. Once set up, they don’t suffer from worker turnover or quality dips from inexperienced staff — offering a real productivity advantage.

The challenge, however, is that this model requires a large number of robotics experts — a talent pool you can’t just recruit from a loudspeaker ad at the local labor market. These specialists must come from a highly developed vocational education system — not the kind of liberal arts education offered by comprehensive universities. In this regard, we need to learn extensively from Germany’s vocational education framework. In fact, this is part of the reason why current education reforms aim to divert half of high school students into vocational tracks. So, don’t think that going into vocational education is the end of the road — future production line specialists will be highly valuable. Of course, this still demands solid learning and plenty of hands-on practice.