[TheBlack_knight]

Manufacturing is not necessarily low skilled. Look to Germany for example, which is a heavy manufacture that uses very advanced factories, some even completely automated.

I have no problem having China make goods for us. Manufacturing is usually a dirty process and the jobs can be relatively low paying.

[dmazin]

I'm not sure how your points connect. If factories are becoming automated, then how does that show that the replaced human workers are skilled?

[TheBlack_knight]

The workers who designed and built the machines are skilled. Inefficient jobs are replaced with with new jobs not necessarily in the same industry.

[dmazin]

While this makes sense, I don't think the ratio is very high. Workers outnumber engineers by extreme amounts and so a replaced "unskilled" job will necessarily open up less jobs than it will close. No?

And the question stands, what to do with those workers? Move them to the facility that builds the robots that displaced them, in a loop?

That said, I do not oppose the replacement of workers with robots in any way, as that would be artificially trying to stop the progress of mankind. But what happens to the workers is a serious issue. What are all the people from the closed American car factories doing?

[alex_c]

>The workers who designed and built the machines are skilled.

Then that's design and engineering, and not strictly manufacturing. Which is what I'm arguing for.