[sgarland]

I know you said “mostly,” but wood is a huge outlier. It’s too heterogeneous to be accurately worked by machines at the level of accuracy that truly fine craftsmanship demands. To be clear, I’m talking about the level where a single chair can cost $20K, and represents hundreds of hours of labor. My FIL is at that level, and the stuff he makes is insane. The market for it is of course tiny, and I’d wager most of his buyers don’t even appreciate the attention to detail he puts into it, but yeah - there are no machines that I’m aware of that can feel perturbations at the sub-mm level and adjust the tool head on the fly, but he can.

This may simply be due to a lack of demand, but regardless, I assure you that machine-produced furniture can’t touch human-produced at the apex of fine craftsmanship.