Technology is nothing. What’s important is that you have a faith in people, that they’re basically good and smart, and if you give them tools, they’ll do wonderful things with them.

An industrial robot’s principal components are: one or more arms that can move in several directions, a manipulator, a computer controller that gives detailed movement instructions.

The Arts and Crafts movement (1860-1910) was born of ideals. It grew out of a concern for the effects of industrialisation: on design, on traditional skills and on the lives of ordinary people.

The car industry automates approximately 80 percent of its assembly processes, which consist of many repeatable actions. In contrast, only around ten percent of the assembly processes for electronics, such as cell phones, are automated, because such products change frequently and are highly customized.

Tailor-made robots could help close this gap by reducing setup times for automation in industries that rely on customization and whose products have short life cycles. Specialized robots would know where things are stored, how to put things together, how to interact with people, how to transport parts from one place to another, how to pack things, and how to reconfigure an assembly line. In a factory equipped with such robots, human workers would still be in control, and robots would assist them.