I love the Intel museum at their campus, but have never been inside a Fab or even a computer assembly factory (or automotive factory, etc). Closest I've come is the place where they make all the Cape Cod Potato chips.
If you were to put together a world "most advanced factories" sightseeing tour, what would be on the list?
I myself only saw Chinese manufacturing, and to lesser extend Vietnamese (which is mostly run by Chinese, and Japanese anyways.)
The PCB stages were fully automated for decades, and even very small shops may have zero manual population. PCB shops look more or less the same anywhere in the world.
Most interesting things come after that.
"Robots" are very easily beaten on cost by manual labour unless there is crazy commitment to volumes, long production runs, and having robotisation done very thoroughly.
Automation has economic advantage in very narrow sets of circumstances.
Though the variance in non-automated assembly lines can be giant. You can easily spend 10 times to assemble a widget with same amount of people, and equipment by getting the process management wrong.
Go find me a reasonably profitable machine shop that doesn't have mostly CNC machines. You won't find many. Even in places with low cost labor like China CNC machines are pretty ubiquitous outside of fairly specialty shops.
You can look on YouTube and see tons of examples of factories that have a mixture of robotic automation and human labor. The production world has changed a ton in the last ten to fifteen years!
CNC machines add capabilities that are not possible by hand. In these shops, you might see deburring done as an extension of the machine cycle where labor cost is high, but by hand where it is low.
GP is right that automation is a huge commitment in design and manufacture. If there are any finicky parts, it's likely that humans will have to do or correct the robot's job, and now you have an idle robot and an engaged human.
Batteries are too a very easy to understand case for automation. You have to make a single widget without alterations by billions for year on end — exactly the case for maximum automation.
Thank you!