green_shift_greta · 990 karma
Nobody's mentioned the industrial side of physical AI — like actual factory "supervisory AI." We're starting to see factory automation move toward systems that monitor production, detect anomalies, predict throughput issues, and initiate corrective action all on their own, without waiting for a human trigger. I toured a facility in Stuttgart last month where a human supervisor manages like 400 machines. One person. The AI flags anything statistically weird and he investigates maybe 6-8 things a day.
MLEngineer_Kowalczyk · 8.3k karma
The thing I keep coming back to is self-verification in AI agents — systems that have internal feedback loops and can autonomously check and correct their own work, instead of needing humans to review every step. InfoWorld That's what's actually making agentic AI deployable at scale. Before that capability matured, you'd catch hallucinations or compounding errors in multi-step workflows all the time. Now? Still not perfect, but it's night-and-day.
devghost_actual
Can confirm. We went from a 12% error rate in automated document processing to under 1% after we added self-verification loops. The lawyers in our office almost had a party.
robotics_nerd_93 · 2.1k karma
Can we talk about humanoid robots for a sec because the price drop is insane. Unitree's G1 is now $16,000 — that's supposed to be democratizing access for researchers worldwide. A university robotics lab near me has four of them. FOUR. Running around doing pick-and-place tasks like it's nothing. A few years ago that hardware would've been a million-dollar research grant conversation.
PragmaticPaula_
Still not useful for unstructured environments though. I've watched those things get confused by a cardboard box at a weird angle for like 45 seconds.
robotics_nerd_93
True lol. But the trajectory is undeniable.
throwaway_mfg_worker · 344 karma
I'll be the one to say it: I got displaced by this stuff. Quality control at an auto plant. They brought in edge computing vision systems and our weld pass rate went from like 92% to 99.5%. Great for the company. Equipment downtime dropped 70%. They kept three of us as "supervisors" but the job is just watching a screen now. Pays less. Not sure how I feel about being the guy who monitors the robot that does my old job.
WrenchMonkey_Dev (OP)
That's the part of this conversation that I think gets glossed over too fast on threads like these. Sorry man, genuinely.
SynthWave_Economist · 5.7k karma
The data does say automation shifts job roles rather than eliminating them outright — it handles repetitive tasks while increasing demand for oversight, strategy, and system management. But that framing can feel pretty cold when you're the one whose paycheck got cut.
Pell_Grantham · 1.2k karma
Yeah the "agentic" thing is real and it's not hype anymore. The big shift isn't just one AI doing one task — it's about interoperability, where agents from completely different platforms can now discover each other, negotiate, and exchange services autonomously. Our dev team uses three different AI systems that now basically talk to each other without us babysitting them. Six months ago that was a pipe dream.
Posted by WrenchMonkey_Dev · 847 upvotes · 214 comments · March 8, 2026
WrenchMonkey_Dev (OP)
Okay so I work in a mid-size logistics company and last month we deployed an agentic AI system that basically manages our entire inbound routing workflow. No human touches it unless something genuinely weird happens. Six months ago that would have been a three-person job. I'm not complaining — I helped build it — but it's a trip to watch it just... go. Anyone else feeling like 2026 is weirdly the year things actually clicked? Like we crossed some invisible line?
