A little late replying, but to counter your point: my husband developed robotics that automatically sewed and stacked sections of garments. The machine replaced having to pay persons in the U.S small wages, but had to meet meet all the OCEA, environmental, etc. regulations.
Nafta destroyed his division’s purpose and shut down every other company in the U.S. that developed similar equipment.
Try to find a garment factory in the U.S. now.
It became cheaper for U.S. companies to pay Mexicans pennies to sew, and ruin their environment and health, than to let an existing machine continue running in the U.S.
Those robotics won’t be an option for 3rd world countries in this lifetime.
You should watch the shows like “How It’s Made” and guess whether a country could buy and maintain machines, much less train uneducated locals.
Today, robots are expensive (so were computers a few decades back).
As the price of robots goes down, and their productivity goes up, they will gradually take over one task after another, spreading to more and more places, and replacing more and more people. Eventually they will be cheap and simple enough to replace third world unskilled labor. It is just a matter of time.
Computers used to be very difficult to use, requiring special skills and lots of training. Now they are made as toddler’s toys. Robots will become easier to use too - eventually just downloading their own training.
“robotics won’t be an option for 3rd world countries in this lifetime.”
I guess that depends on how long you expect to live. This decade, robots are unbolting from the factory floor, and starting to move among us - self-driving cars, Amazon delivery drones, Roomba vacuum cleaners. In the next decade, they will have more general purpose human-like capability to manipulate tools, recognize faces and conduct verbal conversations.
Some technologies actually penetrate the third world quicker than here. It is common to pay for taxi rides in Nairobi with a cell phone today. They are disadvantaged for things that require high capital investment and high skills.
By 2020, at current rates, the total switching power equivalent of a human brain will cost about $1,000, and can have its own Internet connection to everything on the Web, and remote supercomputer data centers.
More intelligence and connectivity will be built into existing products, evolving them into robots of sorts. Five, or twenty five million dollar factory machines that require high skill operators and maintainers may not penetrate the third world very soon - but 3D printers or upgraded milling machines that cost as much as a motorcycle or car sure can spread fast.
India is already a large market for manufacturing robots. Chinese businessmen are already installing some in their textile and footwear factories in Ethiopia. Whole new classes of robots are on the horizon - eventually, everyone will have them. Japan has been planning to build a consumer robotics industry to rival their automotive and consumer electronics industries. Their plans remain on track so far. They project that next decade, it will become one of the largest components of their economy.