Government officials and industry executives in the United States argue that even if factories are automated, they still are a valuable source of jobs. If the United States does not compete for advanced manufacturing in industries like consumer electronics, it could lose product engineering and design as well. Moreover, even though blue-collar jobs will be lost, more efficient manufacturing will create skilled jobs in designing, operating and servicing the assembly lines.

And robot makers say their industry itself creates jobs. A report commissioned by the International Federation of Robotics last year found that 150,000 people are already employed by robotics manufacturers worldwide.

But American and European dominance in the next generation of manufacturing is uncertain. "What I see is that the Chinese are going to apply robots, too," said Frans van Houten, Philips's chief executive. "The window of opportunity to bring manufacturing back is before that happens."

A Faster Assembly Line

At Tesla Motors in Fremont, California, on the edge of Silicon Valley, as many as eight robots perform a ballet around each vehicle as it stops at each station along the production line for just five minutes. The robot arms seem human when they reach over to a stand and change their "hand" to perform a different task. While the many robots in auto factories typically perform only one function, a Tesla robot might do up to four: welding, riveting, bonding and installing a component. Ultimately as many as 83 Tesla S electric luxury sedans a day will be produced at the factory. When the company adds a sport utility vehicle next year, it will be built on the same assembly line, once the robots are reprogrammed.

Tesla's factory is tiny but represents a significant bet on flexible robots, one that could be a model for the industry. And others are already thinking bigger.

Hyundai and Beijing Motors recently completed a mammoth factory outside Beijing that can produce a million vehicles a year using more robots and fewer people than the big factories of their competitors and with the same flexibility as Tesla's, said Paul Chau, an American venture capitalist at WI Harper.

Humans' Changing Role

In the decade since he began working as a warehouseman in Tolleson, Arizona, Josh Graves has seen how automation systems can make work easier but also create new stress and insecurity. The giant facility where he works distributes dry goods for Kroger supermarkets.

Mr. Graves, 29, went to work in the warehouse right out of high school. The demanding job required lifting heavy boxes and the hours were long.

Today Mr. Graves drives a small forklift-like machine. He wears headsets and is instructed by a computerized voice on where to go in the warehouse to gather or store products. A centralized computer the workers call The Brain dictates their speed. Managers know exactly what the workers do, to the precise minute.

Because workers are doing less physical labor, there are fewer injuries, said Rome Aloise, a Teamsters vice president in Northern California. Because a computer sets the pace, the stress is now more psychological.

Several years ago, Mr. Graves's warehouse installed a German system that automatically stores and retrieves cases of food. That led to the elimination of 106 jobs, or 20 percent of the work force.

Now Kroger plans to build a highly automated warehouse in Tolleson.

"We don't have a problem with the machines coming," Mr. Graves told city officials. "But tell Kroger we don't want to lose these jobs in our city."

Some jobs are still beyond the reach of automation: construction jobs that require workers to move in unpredictable settings and perform different tasks that are not repetitive; assembly work that requires tactile feedback like placing fiberglass panels inside airplanes, boats or cars; and assembly jobs where only a limited quantity of products are made or where there are many versions of each product, requiring expensive reprogramming of robots.

But that list is growing shorter.

In an industrial neighborhood in Palo Alto, California, a robot armed with electronic "eyes" and a small scoop and suction cups repeatedly picks up boxes and drops them onto a conveyor belt.

The robot uses a technology pioneered in Microsoft's Kinect motion sensing system for its Xbox video game system.

Such robots will put automation within range of companies like Federal Express and United Parcel Service that now employ tens of thousands of workers doing such tasks.

The start-up behind the robot, Industrial Perception Inc. of Menlo Park, California, will win its first contract if its machine can move one box every four seconds. The engineers are confident that the robot will soon do much better than that, picking up and setting down one box per second.

"We're on the cusp of completely changing manufacturing and distribution," said Gary Bradski, a machine-vision scientist who is a founder of Industrial Perception. "I think it's not as singular an event, but it will ultimately have as big an impact as the Internet."

The New York Times

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