That's a great question, and I'm happy to talk about it. I'm sure that Joseph would talk about it as well, specifically from a steel perspective.
I think what we get is this media image of smokestacks and really heavy industry and dark corners and things like that. If you go into a modern assembly plant, including in the more traditional industries like steel, what you see is often more like a lab than what you would expect from manufacturing—floors so clean you could eat off them, and that type of thing. The introduction of technology into manufacturing is really rapidly changing what is happening. The old jobs and the old type of work that was taking place—screwing things together and old assembly line processes—are being replaced very quickly by autonomous robots.
Even new ways of building things, such as using 3-D printers, are changing the way companies are building products, and very rapidly so. An example would be that we build a lot of auto parts and aerospace parts, especially in Ontario, and probably a lot in your riding would be parts manufacturers for different industries—tier one and tier two suppliers. We're at a stage now where we have a history of being really good in that space. Companies like Magna, Linamar, and Martinrea, for example, are world leaders in this area. But they're changing, because of technology, from being able to maybe take eight or 10 separate parts and making one part that then goes into a bigger unit like an automobile to 3-D-printing that one part. You're eliminating eight parts and making one part to make it more efficient, and that's all through technology.
The face of manufacturing is about that. It's now more about computer programming and design than it is about smokestacks and things like that. That's going to continue to change as new technologies come along. There is a lot of discussion out there about AI and the Internet of things. Most of that Internet of things and AI is actually going to be applied in a factory setting long before it will be applied for you and me in day-to-day use.
Maybe one of the best examples of that is autonomous vehicles, which is a big discussion point right now. The first auto assembly plant I ever went to was a GM plant in Oshawa in about 2001. That entire plant was a mobile robot. Every pickup truck moved from station to station, and the truck itself was on a robot that was autonomously moving. That was almost 20 years ago, and that technology is probably 25 years old. Industry is really at the forefront of implementing all of these technologies, so as we're talking about these in consumer settings, that's really what's happening.
Going back to the earlier question by Mr. Allison, about competitiveness, our concern and the stuff we're looking at, from a Canadian perspective, is that we're falling behind on the development and the adoption side of these new technologies. The further we fall behind, the harder it will be for Canadian industry to keep up in terms of our global competitiveness, whether it's in a relationship with the U.S. or our ability to even supply U.S. companies in those supply chains.
Our focus in Canada needs to be, one, to understand the disruption by these technologies and how they can apply to the industrial sector; two, how we take advantage of those technologies; and three, how we help and get more companies, especially those 10- and 15-person shops that are really risk-averse and unable to adopt technology, to adopt the technology, because they're not adopting it today at the levels they need to in order to be globally scaled and globally integrated.
Hopefully that helps. I'm happy to answer anything specific.