See the following for more thinking along these lines: http://marshallbrain.com/robotic-nation.htm
(This has been on HN before, Google [robotic nation site:ycombinator.com].)
The US would stop sending that capital to China (a huge wealth drain), which is helping build out their economy. The US would gain wealth and capital incentives for further robotic development. The US would gain jobs around robotics in all forms. Profitable manufacturing would need and pay for energy, buildings, transportation, and on and on. Profitable manufacturing would also pay taxes, keeping more teachers etc. employed and bolstering the weak US tax base.
Workers would be needed to create buildings, build roads and transmission lines, repair robots, scrap robots, replace robots, R&D robot tech, provide materials, and so on. It would cultivate a huge ecosystem.
Wouldn't robots eventually move into those fields as well?
The robots aren't doing the financial decision making in the next 35 to 50 years. Assisted analysis (software), sure.
A robot isn't going to understand civil codes when it comes to laying down power lines (humans barely understand the civil codes). A human would be required to follow such guidelines and then could perhaps instruct a robot toward the actual labor.
Maybe one day in a very far off future civil laws will be understood by robots, but I'm betting that's not going to be very high on the list of things to get around to automating. It would also likely require extremely advanced AI, because the robot might have to negotiate civil code conflicts based on decisions made (and this just seems far beyond the next few decades). Who takes responsibility for a robot failing to navigate zoning laws properly?
"The automated engineering done with the EDS, which is still being extended, is close to 98% complete for the simplest buildings and 50-60% complete for the most complex buildings. The tasks that are remaining are not automated, as they are either highly custom, or occur so seldom that the added knowledge capture for these few occurrences does not justify the automation cost."
There's also a similar tool for design of private construction[2].I think the software even understand civil codes.
[1]http://www.aecbytes.com/buildingthefuture/2005/RCCstudy.html [2]http://www.aecbytes.com/feature/2005/Norway_prefab.html
It's hard to tell in advance if this will bring more jobs to low/medium skilled people , which are the ones mostly struggling, or destroy their jobs.
The problem with all that manufacturing being moved overseas is that local jobs are "destroyed". Moving back production for production's sake with the help of robots won't solve this problem. It will only give you a warm cozy patriotic feeling whenever you read "made in $your_country".
Now I think full automation is the future and in the remote future it will liberate humanity from physical labor. But there will be more changes needed than only stuffing factories with robots. We will need an economic system that can cope with a mass of seemingly unemployed/unemployable people.