“It’s the most humbling thing I’ve ever seen,” said Ford’s chief executive about his recent trip to China.
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“I can take you to factories [in China] now, where you’ll basically be alongside a big conveyor and the machines come out of the floor and begin to assemble parts,” he says.

“And you’re walking alongside this conveyor, and after about 800, 900 metres, a truck drives out. There are no people – everything is robotic.”
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Other executives describe vast, “dark factories” where robots do so much of the work alone that there is no need to even leave the lights on for humans.

“We visited a dark factory producing some astronomical number of mobile phones,” recalls Greg Jackson, the boss of British energy supplier Octopus.

“The process was so heavily automated that there were no workers on the manufacturing side, just a small number who were there to ensure the plant was working.

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“China has quite a notable demographic problem but its manufacturing is, generally, quite labour-intensive,” he says.

“So in a pre-emptive fashion, they want to automate it as much as possible, not because they expect they’ll be able to get higher margins – that is usually the idea in the West – but to compensate for this population decline and to get a competitive advantage.”
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