Made them much more efficient, reliable, and greatly improved quality control.
I get the point you're trying to make and I think AI right now is mostly hot garbage, but physical automation has drastically improved the quality of so many products we use today. Cars are safer partially because the robots are so much better at building cars.
Do you have a source on this? I am aware the auto industry is highly automated and robots outperform humans at a lot of the manual labor, but the word "partially" is hand-waving away a lot of big shifts in industrial engineering and national regulations. It just seems difficult to disentangle. (E.g. it is difficult for shops to automate until they get their systems in logistical order, and a low-regulation environment might encourage a race-to-the-bottom of pushing cheap robots way too hard and ignoring QC failures.)
Made them much more efficient, reliable, and greatly improved quality control.
I get the point you're trying to make and I think AI right now is mostly hot garbage, but physical automation has drastically improved the quality of so many products we use today. Cars are safer partially because the robots are so much better at building cars.