IT, pharmaceutical formulation, finance & accounting -- all can be sent outside the borders. Even fields like medicine aren't entirely safe, as scheduled procedures can be performed much more cheaply outside of the US.

There are surgical robots. They have two huge pieces: the machine you put the patient in, and a console the surgeon manipulates. It should be possible to put patient-side units in hospitals all over the place, and have several of them controlled by one surgeon at a central location...like Mumbai.

Everything I can find on this thing indicates the machine costs $2 million and there are a few thousand dollars worth of disposable attachments you have to buy for every surgery. One would expect the hospital would #wantitsmoneyback from an investment like this, right?

I think the issue is that the TYPE of jobs that pay less than $20/hr are more easily automated. Not the fact that they ARE paid less.

The answer: Universal Basic Income.

There are a lot of jobs right now where human labor is cheaper than the capital costs of developing the robotics to replace it. Raise the labor costs and that stops being true.

Haven't seen it yet.

They also told us that technology would mean more high paying jobs because we would have to make the robots. What they did not tell us was that those jobs would be in China.

the Trans-Pacific Partnership and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership are intended to help mitigate and offset the inevitable loss of manufacturing jobs to automation, computerization, robotics, technology (50% loss in next 10 years).

Farsighted Democrats will support our future leading the world - or we'll be reduced to railing against the future!

"Henry Ford's Model T put a lot of buggy whip makers out of business even though they were doing everything right."

Carriage makers easily transitioned into auto body work; most auto manufacturers hired successful carriage makers and their staff to design and upholster/detail their high end autos, as well as their lower end work vehicles.
Farriers (and blacksmiths) were a bit different, but that was due to the problem of the rural to urban transition during the 1920's/1030's, and they ended up transitioning to assembly line work, mill work, or repair. My husbands great-grandfather had no problems becoming the local auto mechanic when the local need for his family's smithy started drying up - after the new Ford dealership came to town in the 1930's.
The farriers that were more inclined to treat animals rather than just shoe them soon went into veterinary field, and started taking care of local pets and farm animals. As evidenced by the fact the Veterinary field exploded in the 1930's and 1940's.

The Model T and other manufacturing assembly line production might have put some small skilled businesses out due to the "economy of scale" competition that large-scale manufacturing and new technology brings, but these large companies still provided jobs to replace the jobs they took away - so long as you could move to where the factory or retailer was.

Unfortunately, automation since the 1980's doesn't replace job for job unless you're willing to go out of the country and work for a pittance. And even then, you will be competing with the locals who are in their own process of a rural to urban transition. Productivity has been made so efficient, there is little need for labor. And with permanent incorporation (corporations were only supposed to be chartered for a limited time), shareholder requirements, monopolies, patent strangulation, and "intellectual property protection" that lasts for decades beyond the lifecycle of the product, there is little work or chances for innovation that can employ a large number of excess people at a living wage. What to do with the excess people, who can't move? How do you force people to lower their standard of living to that of the developing country that now has those jobs due to "competition"?

And that's what needs to be addressed.

Haele

who educates policymakers on disability issues, and organizes people with disabilities around those issues, all for the munificent sum of $19 and change an hour. And it's less at most of our sister agencies!

In a pissing on you and telling you it's raining way. It's basically argumental "laundering" of a sort: Using productivity increases through automation as a smokescreen to obscure the main issue of rent-seeking abroad to fatten bottom lines. They're trying to get us to tilt at windmills.

Is a person who would automate/offshore every job except their own still a "Job Creator"?

Did nobody in Corporate America watch "The Lorax"?

If nearly every >$20/hr job could be automated in theory, where does the money come from to "SUPERSIZE YER SKILL SET HAW HAW"?

What is the Ryan Congress going to approve first: Guaranteed Minimum Income, a war with IranAfBexIstan more corporate welfare?

Would you really want to be the last wealthy man in a starving and destitute kingdom?

Most of them types are lawyers, seeing how robots are even taking away physicians' work.

Congress might get some work done!