I like to think about there being a certain amount of entropy in an industrial system that has to be constantly managed. Perhaps it is my training as a chemist, but... Consider that You have to maintain a certain number of acceptable 'microstates' on your 'work-piece' you are processing until you reach approximately the desired end state for a complete product. Obviously there is no law of conservation of precision, but precision is something you can absolutely lose with a lack of constraints on the 'workpiece'. I feel like pick-and-place systems help you remove a fair bit of entropy and get back precision without considerably increasing complexity. 'Workpiece entropy' can be reduced in a number of ways. For example, Laser cutting a bunch of parts with a precise and small tab attached is one such way to reduce manufacturing entropy. You might recognize this as GD&T's concept of a "datum", but I think the argument is much more than a superficial observation.
'Entropy' is a statistical mechanics term used to describe systems with massive numbers of states and high levels of uncertainty.
Consider that sheet of laser-cut parts, still tabbed to the sheet, each part has 6 degrees of freedom, but the tabs constrain 5 of them, so for N parts you've collapsed the accessible microstates from a 6N-dimensional configuration space down to roughly N. That's a dramatic entropy reduction. Once you snap those tabs and free the parts, entropy jumps back up because every part can now move in all six directions.
When the pick-and-place robot grabs each part and places it with tight tolerances say ±0.05mm in position and ±0.1° in rotation you're constraining each part back to a tiny volume of configuration space.
I am curious to see if this lens of thermodynamics in manufacturing can be applied further to make useful policy decisions or reveal deeper truths for industrial systems, much like how physics principles have been applied to financial markets to great effect.