How dairy robots are changing work for cows and farmers

China famously now has "dark factories" where everything is automated, so lighting is not needed.

Guess this means we're about to have "dark dairies" where cows can be kept chained up in perpetual darkness, with robots doing the absolute minimum required to keep them alive, pregnant and producing milk.

I know this is not a particularly pleasant thought, but I'd like to hear counterarguments about why this wouldn't happen, since to me it seems market pressures will otherwise drive dairies in this direction.

(For what it's worth, I'm not a vegan, but a visit to a regular human-run dairy sufficiently confident in its practices to conduct tours for the public was almost enough to put me off dairy products for good.)

These robots don't look conducive to automating the labor specific to factory farming. Overlap with manure cleanup at best, but do factory farms have spacious enough layouts to be compatible with those?

More generally, the egg market in the US has gone from 4% cage-free in 2010 to 39.7% cage-free in 2024. Cows don't have a "non-factory" label but I don't see why one wouldn't be as successful. You also supposedly get more milk per cow the nice way.

The far future will have ever more cows per capita given human fertility trends, so I don't see the preference for quality over quantity regressing, or any sudden need to produce more milk than ever.