In manufacturing, every year will see extraordinary upgrades in some processes. But firms will have to decide how many areas they will risk changing at one time and how much capital they can devote to the effort. With each decision, they will have to balance the benefits of investment in the ideal tool for a specific task with the loss of flexibility that comes from committing to that tool and that task. Even the steel industry, a poster child for automation, required forty years to increase its per-worker output from 260 tons to 1,100 tons—an annual improvement of less than 4 percent.
Across the manufacturing sector globally, the Boston Consulting Group reports that the stock of installed robots grew only 2 percent to 3 percent per year during 2005–14—no faster than total manufacturing output. As robotics pioneer Rodney Brooks observed in MIT Technology Review, “I regularly see decades-old equipment in factories around the world. I even see PCs running Windows 3.0—a software version released in 1990.” Anyone who has peered around a checkout counter to see the readout on the cashier’s screen knows this feeling. Brooks continued: “The principal control mechanism in factories, including brand-new ones in the U.S., Europe, Japan, Korea, and China, is based on programmable logic controllers, or PLCs. These were introduced in 1968 … I just looked on a jobs list, and even today, this very day, Tesla Motors is trying to hire PLC technicians at its factory in Fremont, California.”