Lots of that design can be fairly easily automated: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hwzz-96WliU. And that's without all the "fancy" robotics like arms and so on that is only dropping in price and rising in usability.
Factory automation design as a service is already a huge sector but it can get a lot bigger. Of course the capital barrier to entry to standing up a factory for some widget will go up, but the unit price might not. It remains to be seen how far into the low-end, low-volume, high-SKU-count that process will reach. Maybe things like standard-ish robotic cells will allow agility in the factory. If being able to make one-off parts in a highly data-driven factory is Industry 4.0, maybe that's Industry 5.0!
Presumably it will become less possible to spin up production of, say, a whole new design of a speaker in a few days with some new tasks for the workers and some rejigging of basic machines, but it sounds like a sector that will see some interesting progress in the next 50 years.
Factory automation design as a service is already a huge sector but it can get a lot bigger. Of course the capital barrier to entry to standing up a factory for some widget will go up, but the unit price might not. It remains to be seen how far into the low-end, low-volume, high-SKU-count that process will reach. Maybe things like standard-ish robotic cells will allow agility in the factory. If being able to make one-off parts in a highly data-driven factory is Industry 4.0, maybe that's Industry 5.0!
Presumably it will become less possible to spin up production of, say, a whole new design of a speaker in a few days with some new tasks for the workers and some rejigging of basic machines, but it sounds like a sector that will see some interesting progress in the next 50 years.