It’s the combination of plentiful labor and automation that is lethal. Automated factories can churn out goods cheaply, but who is going to buy them in no one has a good job? This is why electronics and even cars have stayed relatively cheap. With Artificial Intelligence becoming ever more capable, you will see many “knowledge” workers get replaced too. If you can boil your job down to a set of rules, you are in trouble. Even jobs which involve significant amounts of creativity will eventually be on the chopping block.
Jobs that involve very complex movements and crawling into tight places will be safe (plumbers and electricians).
> With Artificial Intelligence becoming ever more capable,
It’s still woefully lacking; we have about the technology/knowledge to make an epileptic chicken so far as real AI is concerned.
Back in the '50s I was up in the NorthEast and read where a Ford representative, or one of the automakers, was giving a demo on some new automated production line equipment. He was bragging on how the robots needed no vacations, sick days, rest room breaks, etc.
One of the union reps asked him how many cars did those robots buy. Embarrassed silence. While I always looked askance at any union, I thought the guy had a point.
Although not automation, a similar situation showed up years later, when Perot was running for President. He showed a photo of a Ford plant in Mexico and asked "What's wrong with this picture?" Hell, I couldn't see anything wrong. He pointed out that the factory had no parking lots. The workers there couldn't afford to buy the product they were making - they were bused in from the nearby slums. That, to me, was NAFTA in a nutshell, and has been reinforced every year since.