never again have to wait eight %&**$#!! weeks for those little DSLR rig doodads to arrive from China!

Huh, eight weeks is strange :-)

Even if you could get the machine for free (and the initial tooling) making cheap doodads would be a loss as the cost in tool sharpening alone would make it lots of $$$.

This thing is not for cheap things :-)

most likely an aircraft turbine. Btw....nc mills have been around for over 3 decades.

"That appears to be just a demonstration part (serves no real purpose) to show off the sophistication of the multi-axis machine. Impressive."

I'll tell you what's impressive, and bloody scary if you happen to be employed as a tool and die maker... Just a couple of months ago in Germany I was watching six guys making parts similar to whatever was produced in that demo. In Germany, those are highly-skilled, 70-80 thousand Euro a year jobs.

If you look closely at the cutting apparatus you can see a built-in nozzle squirting some kind of fluid, presumably for cooling and lubrication.

When I see something like this I first feel awe at the power and precision of this kind of tool. Then I think deeper about the level of technological sophistication and automation that is necessary to drive our way of life. Building the machines we use on a daily basis requires this level of precision. We need machines to build the machines that build our machines--and so on. It goes beyond just the economics of labor, but of course that is considerable. And the CNC routers and machine tools are just a tiny part of the end product. There will also be electronics, plastics, ceramics, software, etc. Fifty years ago (probably much less) every piece of a product was made by people with generally simple tools. And those machine tools were also made by people. Soon people will prove to be not precise enough or economically viable even for the most rudimentary assembly processes. Should we ever have a hiccough in our technology and loose the ability to rely on these machines, we would fall very, very far back to a technological levels where humans could once again build things on our own.

Very good points. I believe that ultimately, the need for precision may drive robotics more than labor costs. However, there is currently a huge push in robotics driven by private industry. Uber just hired about a third of the staff of Carnegie Mellon U's robotics faculty--a leading US and world robotics intitution. (All Uber drivers are just a brief stopgap for fleets of self-diving vehicles dispatched through the company's system.)

Another thing that could drive robot automation to a new level in factories would be any policy changes that favored domestic manufacturing in US/G7 countries over developing nations. These types of things are constantly on the horizon, especially in election years. (For example, there is an ongoing effort to harmonize tax codes among nations etc.) Domestic manufacturing in developed nations is much more likely to lean heavily on robotics.

Whether it's five years away or 20, at some point in the near future, humans just won't be precise or cost-effective enough to manufacture the machines that we will demand compared to robots that will be easily able to reconfigure on the fly for just-in-time manufacturing. (My bet is that the DMG machining tool in the video is software reconfigurable to create whatever file is loaded on the SD card.) At the point where it is cheaper and better to have machines do all the manufacturing, we as a society will have to re-asses our definition of work, labor, and the economy. There will likely be some pain involved.

Great old song, a hymn for this topic: