Advanced automation/Large scale industry

It seems likely that a lot of goods and products made today in factories will increasingly be made using smaller-scale flexible computer-controlled manufacturing methods dispersed across communities and even in homes. Also tasks like water treatment, food production and power generation may well become more distributed and decentralized, again perhaps down to the domestic level.

However larger scale industrial systems are likely to remain for some time to come doing jobs such as mining, material processing and recycling, transport infrastructure and specialised manufacturing and construction.