All routine jobs -- whether manual or not -- will be automated.
All the people who promise to bring factory jobs back to the USA are dreaming. Those jobs are gone forever -- not to China, but into ether.
The factories may come back to the USA, but the jobs will be automated.
As to RWR's post - kids need to go into robotics -- this isn't a solution as only I would think 10% of students have this ability.
even in the wider world where routine jobs are automated, 80% of people can only do this type of a job. I don't believe we can help them when jobs get automated, I don't believe they can be re-trained. And even among current students, the same pareto rule -- 80% will be useful for no job.
I wonder if this 53 gear old auto technician can retrain for this field.
As a follow on to your point, we already have a glimpse of what will happen to the 80%. In the rust belt, the chronic and long term unemployed are rapidly becoming unemployable for life. They can’t pass the whiz quiz and exist by going from food pantry to food pantry and hitting up thrift stores for hand me downs. Once quaint mining towns and rural farming communities are now home to heroin and meth addicts.
I’ve worked in IT my entire career. It is abundantly clear the IT industry is disappearing into the cloud. All IT is going to become a subscription, business and consumer, with increasingly fewer and much lower paying jobs on the street.
If you work in a field that is not being disrupted by the advance of big data, technology, automation and cloud based IT, you should be figuring out how to become the disrupter.