[PeterisP]

"Are they saying that higher a job pays, the more likely it is to get automated?"

Yes. One aspect that I've seen in e.g. computer vision and robotics for industrial automation is that there are a lot of processes for which we have the technology to automate production, but it's not worth because it's currently cheaper to get the job done manually by someone in a poor country getting paid very, very little.

However, the obvious implication is that if/when the worker conditions in the world improve and these workers start requiring reasonable wages then these jobs will be automated pretty much immediately. If the shop owner has to choose between buying a robot or providing a handful of rice to a team of near-slaves, the people are cheaper; If the shop owner has to pay something comparable to the minimum wages in the first world, then the best worker gets to supervise and clean the imported robots and all the others are out on the street.

If the first world would stop offshoring these jobs to poor countries, then that would not mean large numbers of blue collar jobs coming back, that would mean shifting to automation.