factory automation

A video tour of Apple's highly automated Macintosh factory in Fremont, California, where the Mac SE and Macintosh II were built.

Part one of an American Airlines training video presented by Captain Warren VanderBurgh on automation dependency. It grew out of a program on wake turbulence avoidance, and this restored version has the audio cleaned up.

A WSJ report on China's 'dark factories', highly automated plants run by robots with little human presence, visiting Zeekr's EV factory. It covers Chinese labor costs, automation and overproduction in the EV industry.

A NeXT, Inc. promotional video showing its highly automated factory and the manufacturing of the NeXT Cube, including automated circuit board assembly.

Marques Brownlee walks through Tesla's factory with Elon Musk, showing production lines for the Model S, X and 3.

A 41-minute factory tour showing how the BMW i3 electric car is built from start to finish, in the style of a Megafactories documentary. It shows a highly automated production line with carbon-fiber body construction and robots doing most of the work.

Destin Sandlin tours United Launch Alliance's rocket factory with CEO Tory Bruno, showing friction stir welding, structural rocket skins and large milled parts.

Strange Parts tours JLCPCB's large PCB factory in Huizhou, China, walking through the printed circuit board manufacturing process step by step. It shows the machinery, quality checks and scale behind cheap prototype boards.

A behind-the-scenes tour of the ILFORD factory in Mobberley, England, showing how black and white film, paper and chemicals are made. It walks through emulsion making, coating, finishing, QC and distribution.

CGP Grey's video "Humans Need Not Apply" argues that automation will make a large part of the workforce economically obsolete, much as engines did for horses. It surveys robots and software replacing both physical and mental labor.

A re-upload of American Airlines captain Warren Vanderburgh's 1997 presentation warning that pilots who over-rely on cockpit automation lose manual flying skills and awareness. The uploader adds context from his own flying.

Destin Sandlin of Smarter Every Day tours a Kodak factory to show how photographic film is manufactured. This is part one of a three-part series covering the large-scale coating and production process.

Technology Connections takes apart a 1970 Wurlitzer 3400 jukebox to show how electromechanical relays and switches automated its behavior without a computer.

An overview of the Quiet Logistics warehouse using Kiva Systems robots, narrated by company executives. The robots bring storage racks to human pickers at stations.

A run through the 32 factory presets of the Yamaha DX7 FM synthesizer, with timestamps for each patch such as brass, strings, pianos, bass and tubular bells. It is a straight audio demo of the sounds.

A short animation illustrating the proposed nanofactory concept, where nanomachines assemble atomically precise parts into larger products. It depicts how such a system might build macroscopic goods from raw materials and energy.

Tom Scott tours Ocado's automated grocery warehouse, where thousands of robots move boxes on a grid called the Hive, and asks whether they are individual robots or a hive mind.

A circa-1964 film showing AMF's AMFare system, which ordered, cooked and packaged hamburgers, fries, shakes and more automatically for a pilot fast-food operation.

A Seeker short documentary on a lab where robots run experiments with almost no human intervention, covering automation and active machine learning in drug discovery and synthetic biology.

Footage of the Mercedes A-Class production line at the Rastatt plant in Germany, filmed in 2013. It shows robots and fixtures working through assembly.

Rick Reed of WhatsApp explains at Erlang Factory 2014 how the service scaled to billions of messages with a very small engineering team. He covers the FreeBSD and Erlang stack, Mnesia usage, server counts and bottleneck work.

A joint Erlang Factory 2016 keynote by Phoenix creator Chris McCord and Elm creator Evan Czaplicki on using the two together, including Phoenix.Presence design and PubSub optimizations.

Destin Sandlin tours a progressive metal stamping factory, showing machines that stamp millions of metal parts and the tooling behind them.

AVweb's flight trial of Garmin's Emergency Autoland system, which flies a plane to a runway and lands it when the pilot cannot. It is part of Garmin's Autonomi automation on the G3000 avionics.

Scene from episode 2 of HBO's Chernobyl in which an official who once ran a shoe factory is put in charge of a critical role. It shows how unqualified appointees end up in charge of technical matters.

Dominion is a two-hour documentary using drones and hidden cameras to expose conditions in animal agriculture, including food, clothing, entertainment and research. It questions humanity's dominion over animals.

Tim Ewald's Clojure/conj talk uses furniture making with hand tools versus machine tools as an allegory for software. It explores how automation changes what we make and how we think about our work, and why Clojure's small set of simple tools matters.

A DEF CON 26 talk by investigative journalists and hackers on the fake science industry, with bogus conferences and predatory journals that give studies false credibility. It draws on a large investigation into the money behind them.

Joe Rogan's long interview with Andrew Yang during his 2020 presidential run. They discuss universal basic income, automation and his policy proposals.

A 1936 Chevrolet promotional drama, 'Master Hands', showing car manufacturing from foundry to finished vehicle in Flint, Michigan. It is a National Film Registry selection and a record of early mass production.

A short Insider Tech look at Ocado's grocery warehouse where thousands of robots on a grid pack orders, communicating over 4G to avoid collisions. It handles around 65,000 orders a week.

Valve's short video on building the Steam Controller on a heavily automated assembly line, which the company designed itself. It shows the robotic manufacturing process and US final assembly.

GE Lighting's official how-to for factory resetting C by GE smart bulbs, using a long sequence of precisely timed on and off cycles.

A short clip of a ramen restaurant in Nagoya where robot arms cook the noodles. Human waiters serve the food.

A short 2009 WIRED clip showing Kiva Systems robots moving inventory shelves in a warehouse serving online retailer Zappos. It shows how mobile robots bring goods to pickers instead of people walking the aisles.

Declassified HUD footage of an F-16 whose unconscious pilot is saved by the Automatic Ground Collision Avoidance System. It shows the aircraft pulling out of a dive on its own.

Vim creator Bram Moolenaar's 2007 Google Tech Talk on habits for efficient text editing. He explains how to spot repetition and inefficiency, then use editor features to fix it.

A Kurzgesagt video on the conditions in which most farm animals are raised. It argues that cruelty is for cheaper rather than better meat, and that a small price increase per meal could avoid most of the suffering.

Andrew Ng speaks at the Stanford MSx Future Forum about how AI is transforming industry after industry, comparing its impact to electricity. The talk also touches on evil-AI worries, jobs and basic income.

A Kurzgesagt animated explainer on meat: why people love it and what it costs animals, the environment and health. It lays out the complicated trade-offs of meat production and consumption.