[jessaustin]

That's really interesting, but I'm not convinced that automation has no role here. When a human sculpts a last, she must be using some techniques and rules of thumb, even if a large part of the craft is "by eye". It seems that "starter" or "template" lasts could be produced using foot scans and whatever rules the sculptor will divulge. Then the sculptor could use the templates in making the final lasts...

[Retric]

Sure, but automation is not free. Supose you could design a machine to make it twice as fast for 10 million and sell them at 10,000$ a pop. Your world wide market would need to be ~1,000 of them a year which is probably not even close to realistic. You can't really charge more as the hand made approach is reasonably fast and nobody is going to dump 20+K to buy one if it's only saving the, a few hours a week.

PS: Feel free to play with the numbers but there is a reason so much of the world is sill not automated.

[jessaustin]

That explains why this wasn't done back in the industrial age. Lots of people seem to think that manufacturing 3D objects is going to get much easier soon.