News from Ifra Expo about Manroland's progress towards "lights out" printing reminds me of that old joke about the high-tech factory of the future, operated entirely by robots and watched over by one man and a dog: "The dog is there to make sure the man doesn't touch anything, and the man is there to feed the dog".

It will be fascinating to see how far Manroland can push this, and whether this solution does indeed become commercially viable by 2012.

The quest for yet more automation is also significant when viewed in the context of recent investments, with News International's massive re-equipping being the most notable example. Visitors to the publisher's Broxbourne supersite already remark about how few personnel are seen about the place. Re-reading some of the coverage of the plant's opening I see there's a comment about one of the few non-automated tasks being the movement of pallets of newspaper bundles onto trucks. This facility is as state-of-the art as it gets.

Having made such enormous efficiency gains, and correspondingly enormous reductions to their headcount and wages bill, I can't help wondering if NI (and any of its counterparts who are in the business of re-equipping newspaper printing plants) are seriously desirous of the one man and a dog scenario. I realise personnel costs are important, but hope we aren't approaching a day when the most characterful individual left in the world of newspaper production is a Jack Russell.