Dark Factories? Of course you thought there wasn't anyone on the floor. They were hiding in the offices while management pretended to turn the lights on for you.
Let me guess -- you just finished the McKinsey Quarterly deck on lights out factories, and now you think humans are going away because you saw a couple Fanucs feeding pallets into CNC mills while management waxed poetic about the future of manufacturing.
You're going to believe that right up until your first ECN comes through and you have to scrap fifteen hundred fixtures because a twenty three year old design engineer in San Jose wasn't taught in their overpriced engineering university that hard internal corners are stress risers and cause parts to fail in cyclic loading. Then it'll become your problem.
While you're dealing with that, you'll look around and notice that the lights in your "Dark Factory" have been on a lot dealing with these issues. You've had to hire more people than you thought for machine maintenance, and you don't even want to think about the very well lit shipping department in the back. Surprise -- another issue, the well staffed and well paid QC department is saying that half of your parts and assemblies are either OOS or failing ORT. You turn the lights back on.
Then you'll finally open up ASME Y14.5 and really read it this time, and not just skim over it again to figure out why an angularity tolerance isn't measured in degrees and see that the cause of your process capability going to crap was because a process two vendors upstream was slowly coming out of spec.
After that, you'll think you've figured things out and crack open Shigley's to read about Hertzian contact stress and realize that the super hard and expensive unobtanium carbide lathe tooling you forced down your vendor's throat was going to end up adhesive wearing away anyways despite the softer aluminum parts they were cutting because it didn't matter what your hardness differential was. Daddy Bharat Bhushan was always going to get you. You then implement a tool change schedule and then it hits you.
Dark factories aren't happening because dark factories aren't a robotics problem. They aren't even just a manufacturing problem. They're an operational, finance, and everything under the sun problem.
Recursive feedback mechanisms? Sure, pal. The only thing here recursive is this story. If I had a dollar every time I heard it, well, I guess I could afford an actual factory.
last time I was in Shenzhen I walked through a dark factory & the thing that got me was there were literally zero workers on the floor, the entire production line was running in complete darkness because when you don't have humans you don't need lights and these robots were assembling full vehicles autonomously 24/7
just got off a call with the engineer who designed those systems & he told me something that completely shifts the paradigm, his robots are now manufacturing other robots that are deploying across multiple factories & we're watching the emergence of recursive production loops where workerless systems create more workerless systems
this isn't just automation replacing labor anymore, we're seeing production architectures with autonomous reproduction capabilities & that's fundamentally different because you're scaling through selfreplicating manufacturing cycles
what we're really observing is the convergence of dark factory infrastructure with recursive feedback mechanisms that enable production systems to spawn new production capacity autonomously & when you zoom out and look at the full picture this represents a phase transition in industrial evolution where manufacturing behaves more like biological organisms with selfreplication than traditional mechanical processes