I've had some experience with the robotics / automation engineering side of industry. It's not easy to take super high-level automation and turn around and mak

I've had some experience with the robotics / automation engineering side of industry. It's not easy to take super high-level automation and turn around and make it produce something else entirely. Base / core machinery- such as a 3-axis CNC machine, or a lathe, or a saw, for instance, are fairly nimble- if you have the right cutting bits (which you probably do, considering that it's industry) you can switch from milling out aluminum mounting plates to milling out enclosures for electronics fairly easily. At this level, generally humans are responsible for sticking in the material and telling the machine what to do each time an action is performed. Where it gets more complicated is at the higher levels of automation, where humans might be supervising the machines, but aren't initiating processes themselves- for example, there was a prod cell that I worked with that had a robot putting raw material into a mill and then removing it- humans program those arms, but then after that, it just goes, and goes, and goes. Programming those arms is generally an exercise in making sure the math works, and then implementing the job in a bunch of for loops and hard-coded / static adjustment variables and the like. In these instances, to make the cell produce something else, not only do you have to program the machine that actually produces parts, but you also have to reprogram the bot that puts and pulls from it, and you may also need to change the grip on the bot to support the new geometry. At the really high levels, like how car manufacturing is currently, there are processes where metal blocks go in and a whole monoframe chassis comes out. Taking that and saying "I want a ventilator assembly" is pretty much insane- besides reworking the entire line to support the new process, you've got to wire everything up, test it, inspect it, make sure everything is up to OSHA standards, etcetera etcetera, etcetera. Going from producing one thing with a high amount of automation to another that doesn't have any similar parts is insanely difficult. Not saying it isn't worth it, but it might be better to go to the factories that are already producing the stuff we need- ventilators, masks, respiratiors, tests- and seeing if there are any bottlenecks that could be removed. The best way? Have enough stuff on hand to actually handle a crisis. Too bad prepping for a rainy day doesn't really align with maxing out dividends and payoffs.