There are of course many, many plans involving robotics in some form or another, but my current favourite is the "all in one factory" which was inspired by playing Portal 2 oddly enough. So imagine a car factory with all it's robot arms, already such factories are being designed so they can make several different types of car on the one production line, but why stop there, with modular tools the same production line could churn out white goods, furniture, electronics, y'know everything.
If you think about it that's absolutely the most efficient way to go, instead of rebuilding factories every time you want to mass manufacture one product, design a smart factory that can redesign itself to make anything from raw materials. Better yet with a foundry on site a lot of the materials could come from recycling, also instead of mass manufacturing crap that you hope people are going to buy, everything could be on a by-order basis, indeed every single thing that comes out of that factory could be unique.
There's 3D printing sites where people post their designs for free, but what if they got paid, the factory itself may be automated but it would create jobs for work-at-home designers/artists/engineers who instead of getting paid an hourly wage or salary would submit their designs and get a percentage of the profit on however many are actually made (depending upon factors of complexity so there's as much incentive to design real cars as toy cars) and there would be feedback & rating systems so the good designs (and designers) would get acknowledged over the bad.
So there would be one of these factories in each region and aside from raw materials this insane system of global freight would cease, and more importantly everyone (even people who want to prototype stuff) will get exactly what they want, there won't be any more reject stores (retail outlets where other retails dump the crap they can't sell) and because of that I imagine it'll all end up being cheaper.
And makes building my robot army of doom all the easier.
