Brilliant, thank you. I see, aside from fully automated labs, they work with various kinds of industry-specific drones and robotics. The phrase "modular laboratories" catches my eye, and reminds me I recently learned about your business called the Modular Company, doing tech due diligence. From the wide range of industries listed, I imagine there's a lot that can be learned from the clients, and the businesses being assessed, their niche knowledge and experience.

(Ah, one of their clients is FANUC, a Japanese robotics company I learned about from the Wikipedia article on lights-out manufacturing.)

"Dark factory" is the perfect term, that the labs can operate without lights, heating, and other human needs - but I also like how it has a cyberpunk feel. Another aspect I find attractive is that it treats a laboratory as an automated system, like a program that is implemented in hardware and software (and "wetware", humans participating in the system) - probably including some kind of AI as part of the process.

How about a "lights-out company", or dark business. (Well the latter sounds too suspicious, haha.) Surely there are people working on automated business systems, modelling it as a machine or program with inputs and outputs, self-modifying based on reward functions, adaptive and evolutionary.

Now that the production of software is getting automated, mechanized and industrialized, I've heard people say that the differentiating factor for successful software is the domain-specific knowledge of the businesses where it's being applied. Perhaps that's becoming true of mathematics too, where pure maths - like software for developers - is dominated by automation, the cost of production so low that humans cannot compete with the machines. The term "software factory" is pretty old, but it's taken on a new meaning where the role of humans is mainly managing an automated system, often with language models working day and night without requiring much oversight.