I mean, it's still just 1 person every 500 sq ft. That's a pretty sparsely populated factory. And nowadays automation rarely reduces the number of employees su

I mean, it's still just 1 person every 500 sq ft. That's a pretty sparsely populated factory. And nowadays automation rarely reduces the number of employees substantially. The days of a worker doing one very simple task day in and day out are long gone. Most automated manufacturing lines are designed with every step having an associated operator who can load material in and out (which is a very difficult task to automate generally), which also keeps a person conveniently located for handling errors, cleaning, light maintenance, handling edge cases, assisting people at neighboring workstations, etc. In fact, automation actually often requires more labor as robots tend to be slower than human workers and prone to various errors which humans would simply deal with. Their advantage though is in automation's consistency, which allows for much more efficient supply chain management. While some automated systems can be made to outperform human operators, this is usually prohibitively expensive.