I sort of work much on automation. Once upon a time in a Canada futon factory I worked as summer jobber. They had a automation packing machine that is like getting broken every two or three hours so the whole line of workers have to wait for it to get fixed, like most my later working scenarios. I do believe I have pretty solid engineering background. The biggest problem of automation is the mechanical parts are so easy to break down. The second problem is electronic chip mostly last two years, if they are located in a very complex place (inside an engine, tall building roof etc), repair and replacement cost is prohibitive. Untrained and transient labors hardly think of the two problems.

while doers do, haters hate. It is complex.

So more expensive products and less jobs because of automation.

Next economic crisis here we come.

This seems like a luddite's argument. Automation tends to make things less expensive, and automation hasn't lead to economic crisis' in the past

That's like saying computers are going to destroy a lot of jobs and cause an economic crisis, when in reality the opposite happened

And a lot of automation in manufacturing doesn’t negate the need for human labor anyway. It’s still faster, more efficient, and better QA in many cases to have humans assemble certain things than to use machines. That won’t be the case forever, but the level that people think that the automation is going to be superior or even faster than the human element is often forgotten.

I agree with you that automation doesn’t necessarily lead to a loss of jobs. It can create opportunities for whole new skills and job types.

The struggle has been, especially in the US, that we haven’t then properly prepared or skilled people to do the new wave of jobs that can’t be automated.

I always think of this article [1] from January 2017:

> When the German engineering company Siemens Energy opened a gas turbine production plant in Charlotte, N.C., some 10,000 people showed up at a job fair for 800 positions. But fewer than 15 percent of the applicants were able to pass a reading, writing and math screening test geared toward a ninth-grade education.

So out of 10,000 applicants, less than 1500 were even qualified to interview for a job, of which they only had 800 positions. That’s a problem but the solution isn’t to shun automation.

[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/30/education/edlife/factory-...

So why was it necessary to shift production to China?

Automation tended to kill blue collar jobs, and if you don't have job even cheap is expensive.

The next wave of automation will kill the higher value jobs too.

> So why was it necessary to shift production to China?

It wasn't necessary. You're conflating necessary with desirable.

The gap between the two is an increased profit margin, which is desirable for most corporations.

Further, the CCP is becoming both dramatically more hostile to business in general and more dangerous as a foe to liberal, democratic nations (including Taiwan most prominently), while simultaneously the financial cost of operating in China has continued to climb by the year (which is a trend that is unlikely to significantly reverse). The China discount for offshoring isn't nearly what it was 15-20 years ago.

The disaster that Russia is causing in Europe is a small hint of what China might cause in Asia in the coming decades. Russia's perceived capabilities weren't nearly what the West thought they were; China's military capabilities are more likely to exceed our expectations (in recent history China has more commonly followed the path of hide your strength and bide your time, as opposed to Russia's vacuous boasting), and it's backed up by a gigantic economy with manufacturing that Russia could only dream of.

Thats the catch. Automating here in the west means we can maintain a lower price while creating jobs that would otherwise be lost altogether. I think returning manufacturing with these constraints in mind is a must.

You can't just retrain workers from the jobs they replaced to new jobs.

Takes time and effort but it will be worth it in the end.