The Factory Floor Is Where Digital Manufacturing Hype Goes to Die
I've spent 20 years designing machines and the processes that build them, first in China, then in the United States. In that time, I've watched three or four waves of "the future of manufacturing" arrive with a keynote and leave with a shrug. Lights-out factories. Industry 4.0. The digital twin that would make physical prototyping obsolete. Now it's AI-driven everything.
Some of it stuck. Most of it didn't. And the difference between the two rarely came down to the technology itself. It came down to whether the people selling it had ever chased a 15-micron error across a shop floor at 2 a.m.
I have. So here's what that experience tells me about where digital manufacturing is actually going, as opposed to where the pitch decks say it's going.
The tolerance problem nobody tweets about
Software people think in abstractions. Manufacturing people think in tolerances. That gap explains most of...
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