How's that work? How and why do guys like my nephew continue to do what they do?
Our Socialist polices are driving a lot of the automation because of all the costs for wages, benefits, union rules and cost to comply with draconian government labor laws make employees and human labor undesirable.
Our social polices are killing small business which accounts for most of the dynamic job growth and the large companies use their economies of scale to automate to reduce labor costs.
Manufacturing IS coming back America but jobs are not keeping pace because manufacturers are showing to automate their new production to cut back on employee related expenses mandated by the Democrats and Obama. The bottom line is that Obama and the Democrats had priced human labor out of the market by adding cost huge overheads onto employee wages , insane and predatory workplace safety rules have both increased the cost of labors and generated ridiculous amounts liability for employers that they have replaced people with robots on some job functions just to avoid injuries, union obstruction, low quality of work and productivity destruction adds to the FUBAR of it all and finally the Human Resource paper work burdens and boondoggle put the nail in the coffin for human labor.
Europe is actually well ahead of America in automation because they have had these socialist work rules for decades.
Government regulations do not cause loss of jobs to automation, though they may either slow or accelerate it.
Think about it this way. You own a taxi company. What does it cost you in salary and benefits to keep a taxi operating 24/7? $200,000/year? $300,000/year? I don’t really know.
Imagine you have an option with your next purchase of a new taxi to have it be self-operating. Cost: $100,000 additional, though that will go down over time.
The computer system will last three years and will require perhaps $25,000/year maintenance (probably very much on the high side).
Total cost for human drivers (using $250,000/year) = $750,000 over the three years.
Total cost for the computer-driven vehicle: $175,000 for the same three years.
That kind of financial incentive has nothing to do with government policy and everything to do with the workings of the free market.
Let’s assume I have a moral or ideological aversion to using computer-driven taxis. My competition doesn’t. I will shortly be out of business, since my overhead is a multiple of their’s. I follow their lead, or I go away.