Not OP, but I’m an industrial field tech, my two cents:
“Robot” is a very wide term used for a bunch of different stuff, but mostly for industrial automation devices, which, unfortunately, at the moment are still very dumb. Industrial automation improves output, if your robot really is slower than a human, somebody messed up very badly.
What it doesn’t improve, and instead reduces, is adaptability; humans can perceive and reason on a vastly superior scale to a machine, and they can adapt their actions to changing factors in a process much better than a machine can, and they don’t need to be programmed for every single possibility.
It’ll take a while before machines can replace humans in non-repetitive tasks, but in those task they excel, provided they are properly designed, built and maintained.
Oh it’s “faster” but constantly fucks up and needs to retry the same job over and over, so it averages out to being slower than me just manually putting parts into a welding press. Also, constantly down and needs maintenance to come troubleshoot because it’s angry that a fixture got stuck sideways in an aperture or whatever.
I suspect they’re not actually properly maintained, because the company decided it would be better if there weren’t manuals for the robots. They don’t want us wasting time reading!
I’ve worked in multiple factories, this is just how robots are out here in the Midwest. Maybe you costal elites have nice robots that work, but here in the heartland they’re all shit lol