[sapphireblue]

This is very important. It seems that the automation of labor is underexplored due to political and economical inertia (I know that industrial robots do somewhat improve, but they still are very costly, very proprietary and require experts to use them. Could this be done another way? Companies like Rethink Robotics show that maybe the answer is "yes"). There needs to be more fresh thinking in this space.

There was an ambitious NASA project 35 years ago: a self-replicating lunar factory http://www.nss.org/settlement/moon/library/1982-SelfReplicat... . The engineers tried to design a manufacturing system aiming for almost full parts closure. The project was too ambitious (e.g. it looked optimistically at AI's capabilities), and didn't went past design study stage then;

But maybe now, 35 years later, the technology is good enough for something similar to be viable?