[mvitorino]

My parents used to own a textile factory that employed at one point over 100 people. The business stopped being competitive and eventually was closed down with production moving to places like Eastern Europe, India and China. So I think a lot of those production jobs have already been destroyed in Europe and North America. Automation is an opportunity for manufacturing to move back closer to the creative and consumer ends of the businesses.

I get your point and I do agree that if a revolution like automation happens too fast, there is potential for social shocks such as high levels of unemployment and worse. But, as you state, the decoupling of the production from labor is actually being naturally throttled down by a scarcity of... labour. And that may buy enough time for society to adjust since education and training are taking longer and longer these days and no shortcut has been created for human learning.

[JoeAltmaier]

Folks are still thinking about the problems of yesterday. Yes, overseas factories 'lost' a lot of jobs (actually employment worldwide went up). But today its automation baby. Explosive automation. Factories come back from overseas, but nobody is in these new factories.

Its growing geometrically. In shockingly fewer years than we think, there will be essentially no 'labor' jobs left. America will never again employ labor; its an obsolete idea. Our civilization is leaping forward, and we should plan on a humane response.