Last month, Foxconn, the world's largest electronics manufacturer, began building the future at a Taiwan factory: 300,000 robots.
By the end of next year, the Taiwan-based company, which has been dogged by workforce troubles, including a spate of suicides at its sprawling Shenzhen complex, hopes to have the army of mechanised workers helping to assemble its much-coveted line of consumer electronics, which include Apple's iPhone and iPad.
In three years, Foxconn expects its automated legions to number one million, rivalling its current human workforce of 1.2 million and doubling the world's current population of industrial robots.
While robots have been on the factory floor for decades, some see Foxconn's huge mechanisation push as part of a fundamental shift.
In the short term, that change could have big implications for humanity and developing economies, like China's, dependent on the world's insatiable demand for manufacturing jobs. In the long term, it could affect all of humanity.
In short, the age of the robot may finally be upon us.
It is a change people in the robotics world have been predicting for years, as engineers design increasingly nimble and intelligent robots able to replace their human counterparts. Robots are cheaper, more productive and - at least so far - not known for bouts of worker unrest.