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Even though the White House is partly trying to bring more manufacturing jobs back to the US with its tariff and trade policies, those jobs — especially ones that are repetitive or dangerous — may actually be mostly taken over by new AI-powered, autonomous robots.
The Big Picture: Nearly every American corporation says manufacturing in the US is far more costly than doing so overseas, so migrating back necessitates cost cuts to keep the same margins. Robots — who don’t require salaries, benefits, or insurance — are an obvious solution. So, the mechanized revolution is coming… but it’ll be up to lawmakers and unions to ensure that humans aren’t totally replaced.
Between the Shifts: Morgan Stanley predicts that a billion humanoid robots will walk among us by 2050… with the majority in warehouses and factories.
- BMW is already testing humanoid robots at a factory in South Carolina, and they’ve already been introduced to the production line.
- Tesla is also building its Optimus robots to eventually join the production lines. CEO Elon Musk hopes to have thousands operational by the end of the year.
- Hyundai is the furthest along in its robotic-army ambition at a factory in Georgia, mixing humanoid robots with other droids built for specific functions.
- At the Hyundai factory, robots operate forklifts, deliver car bodies, install parts, and perform quality inspections (reminding us a lot of that scene from Minority Report). Sometimes, the robots even communicate with one another to complete tasks.
The Future: Jim Schmidt, a VP at management consulting firm Oliver Wyman, told Axios that using robots could lower labor costs to roughly $100 per vehicle. That’s significant. Amazingly, the United Auto Workers aren’t totally against their incoming robot coworkers — the union just wants to make sure that human paychecks are protected and that people are given the proper training to become supervisors of the worker-bee bots.
Just like with AI, the future role of humans in the workplace may be in overseeing teams of robots.
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