On October 20, 1984, The New York Times ran an article headlined, “GM Factory of the Future Will Run with Robots.” In it, Roger Smith, then GM’s CEO, claimed that automation would save the company from increasingly formidable Asian competitors.
But that didn’t happen. Smith’s robotic factories struggled to match the productivity of their human-run counterparts. Robots sometimes painted each other instead of cars or welded doors shut. And they carried much higher costs.
