It's inside every deployed softdrink vending machine. It's inside every newspaper streetcorner machine. It's in every factory welding and painting robot. It's the "switch" that delivers your phone calls, something once manually done by hand.
This isn't to say that the machines are free, but their labor is essentially free once they are built.
And by *automating* processes, nations with extraordinarily high human labor costs such as Germany and Japan can compete, and often beat, the low cost exporters like China and India.
Automation is the ideal. By automating the right processes, Boeing can make rocket engines and commercial aircraft cheaper and with better quality here in the U.S. than can Sino Air in China. Intel can fabricate chips cheaper, faster, and with better quality here in the U.S., all because it knows how to automate the right processes. Dell can build PC's here in the U.S. cheaper, again due to automation.
Coca-Cola and Pepsi take automation to new heights...and dominate the globe in their field because of it.
Anyone familiar with Kraft's notoriously low cost of production knows that they've used advanced math and physics to automate food processes to such a state that no one can really challenge them.
Those in the know, realize that so-called "cheap labor" is under profound attack from the ever-increasing pace of industrial and post-industrial automation.
You simply can't beat good automation with mere "cheap labor."
Heck, it costs *more* to hire even a cheap Chinese kid to hand out soft drinks than it does to park a Coke machine in an office...where it works 24/7 with no sick days, no training days, no vacations, no work strikes, no job-hopping, etc.
Cheap labor is a vestige of a long-passed Age. People who fret about "cheap labor" being a threat are stuck in the past.
Cheap labor isn't a threat. No, it is "cheap labor" that is being threatened. Who needs it?!
ANSWER: fewer and fewer business processes.