Elon Musk Announces the Next Step: Machines Building Machines

Elon Musk announced today the acquisition of Grohmann Engineering, a German automation company that will allow him to increase Tesla production from around 80,000 cars in 2016 to 500,000 cars in 2018. (Tesla has already increased its vehicle production by 400 percent over the past four years.)

“Because automation is such a vital part of the future of Tesla," Musk said, "the phrase I’ve used before is that it’s about building the machine that’s building the machine. That actually becomes more important than the machine itself as the volume increases."

This is major: It represents where the AI revolution is taking us. In my book I discuss the previous revolutionary stage: 

The 19th century saw the introduction of standardized and interchangeable mechanical parts. This was an idea conceived in Europe but effectively realized in the United States, beginning soon after the Revolutionary War with the manufacture of firearms. A handful of innovative engineers, usually working separately but often drawing on one another's ideas, designed a series of machines that could be run by unskilled workers – boys, in many cases – to produce individual rifle parts. Those parts could then be easily assembled, also by unskilled workers, into a finished rifle, and the parts from one rifle could be used in any other rifle of the same type. The "American system," as envious Europeans called it, opened the door for the onset of true mass production and helped the new republic establish itself with surprising speed as a world industrial power.  

When the concept of interchangeable parts spread to other industries there was an explosion of converging and diffusing technologies based on shared production methods. Nathan Rosenberg has documented direct links from machinery used in rifle manufacture to machinery used in revolvers, locks, sewing machines, bicycles, and eventually automobiles. This diffusion in turn prompted a vast increase in specialization as companies increasingly focused on one part or one machine used by a wide variety of manufacturers. Thus improvements in sewing machines were applied in the production not only of clothing but also in the production of shoes, tents, sails, awnings, saddles, harnesses, handbags, and books. At the same time improvements in the machinery that made sewing machines subsequently became useful in machines used to make tools, cutlery, locks, arms, textiles, and locomotives, not to mention other machines. The reign of the skilled craftsman who made entire products by hand had come to an end.

Musk's announcement today suggests the next logical step in the evolution of standardized assembly. True, we have plenty of automated assembly lines that represent steps along the way, but there's a sense of completion here that's significant. The door to the next stage is opening.