Automation eliminates labor arbitrage. All those chinese serfs are not even going to have time to rack up a credit card debt load buying stuff before they are gone. Without labor for manufacturing the next cost to eliminate is transportation and energy cost, which is why all future automated factories will be outside the urban tax zone but camping on every major city border. Goodbye shipping industry, we barely knew you. Now if we can just get rid of those pesky truck drivers just think about how much money we can save on producing and delivering our automated stuff to the consumers?
What’s that? No one has a job to buy any of this stuff? But we are practically giving it away for free!!!
This is our future unless someone gets exploring outer space going as a new frontier for the unemployed.
I think permanently exporting all leftists to outer space should be the number one item on the agenda.
I hope there are some smart conservatives who are thinking about how to make conservative ideas work within an economy where 40-50 percent of today’s jobs are automated. Because it’s coming to that, sure as the sunrise.
That’s how I understand it as well - technology has gotten cheap enough that automation is becoming cheaper than the logistics to purchase the labor at a lower cost so production is going to become co-located and sized to the market.
We can all stay at home in our PJs videotaping our cats and dogs for the fun and amazement of our friends.
And only Zuckerberg knows how many Biebers there are waiting to explode on the music scene.
/sarc
“... The next cost to eliminate is transportation ...”
As one savvy entrepreneur said, “logistics is waste.”
Why does an automated factory need to be in China? Why not Indiana?