Humans are inefficient and unsafe machines, to be sure. Soft and fragile, slow to respond, 98% blind to the EM spectrum, insanely low communication bandwidth, unusually difficult to motivate, prone to acts of defiance, uncalibrated and wandering accelerometers and rotation sensors, very low precision parts, require a host of special atmospheric and environmental conditions to be met, etc.
I didn't catch anything unsafe. They have laser trip wires anywhere things might be dangerous. This is becomming common industry practice anyway because even people who can see can miss seeing something - a common problem when doing repetitive tasks is to make it faster and faster without realizing that you are getting closer and closer to something unsafe until you loose your arm.
It isn't clear how inefficient they really are. Sure it takes longer to explain to a blind person who to clean the chips off, but in the end it is just a broom (vacuum?) and the only need to do ensure they get everything. Once you train them they have it. Likewise it takes a little longer to explain where the hold downs are then to explain it, but not that much and there are good reasons for hold down placement so once the blind person learns the location there isn't much more training.
I assume they have a few sighted people around for the unique setups that are not enough like something else that it be put into brial. (deaf but not blind can be good at this)
Again back to my first point: everything they pioneer and make work is something that other industry will be interested in as well. Maybe someone with sight can do it easily today, but often once they perfect a method it is better than what the sighted person can do.
Overall I'd prefer to not be doing manual labor myself, but if you can't handle enough school to get a good degree... I'm glad places like this exist for those who need it.
Exactly. They are actually efficient enough to be quite competitive in the private sector. They have large contracts with Boeing, and they manufacture a wide variety of things like white boards, backpacks, shovels, canteens, etc.
That's weird, it sounds incredibly safe to me. I've never been in a machine shop that would be safe enough for blind people to work. OTOH, my mom was responsible for keeping factories safe for the workers who hadn't lost their hearing yet...
We're replacing them as fast as we can, honest.