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Automation eliminates labor arbitrage. All those chinese serfs are not even going to have time to rack up a credit card debt load buying stuff before they are gone. Without labor for manufacturing the next cost to eliminate is transportation and energy cost, which is why all future automated factories will be outside the urban tax zone but camping on every major city border. Goodbye shipping industry, we barely knew you. Now if we can just get rid of those pesky truck drivers just think about how much money we can save on producing and delivering our automated stuff to the consumers?

What’s that? No one has a job to buy any of this stuff? But we are practically giving it away for free!!!

This is our future unless someone gets exploring outer space going as a new frontier for the unemployed.

I believe Newton’s first law of motion applies to predicting the future - a body remains at rest or continues to move at a constant velocity unless acted upon by an outside force.

In other words, everything will continue as in the past, until an outside forces changes it. This unexpected outside force is often refereed to as the Black Swan Theory.

While we can use the past to predict trends, we can not truly predict the future for the simple reason there are too many variables and is by definition unpredictable.

I think it would be safe to say an event will occur that will change everything. Trying to pin down that particular event is what is impossible. It could be war (it has been close to 70 years since the last major world war, we are closer to another than many would like to think about). Or, it could be a truly world wide pandemic not seen since the early 1900s. Or it could be spontaneous revolutions in a bunch of different countries with the populations over throwing their existing governments.

Regardless, there will be a large loss of human life and a disruption of trade. And that is my point. When you have world wide trade and every nation’s economy is based on that trade when it is disrupted, there will be chaos and perhaps famine.

People have become to reliant on technology. If that technology were to disappear (if the power gets shut off) most will not know what to do.

I do not see a happy future for mankind.

The article assumes that undeveloped areas will suffer from these changes, because the old path to development will not be available to them.

But new paths to development will become available, from these same technologies.

Increasingly, undeveloped areas will find it easier, cheaper and faster to just make their own stuff locally. Robots will get better and cheaper, just like cell phones did - everyone will get them, and sooner than folks thought ahead of time.

Artificial intelligence will increasingly replace the need for an educated workforce, potentially REDUCING the comparative advantage of more developed societies. Those who invent new things could make huge fortunes quickly, but the bulk of the human population will quickly be able to get their own copy at little incremental cost (a software update).

If undeveloped countries don’t have the capital to buy their own production equipment, just leave the door open, and foreign companies will set up shop to produce locally, as it becomes more economical - prices will still drop for their consumers, and there will still be secondary business for the local economy, from having production there (energy, raw materials, etc.).

As the article mentions, the equipment itself will become less capital-intensive over time, which will make it easier to move. It will become easier to improve standards of living in undeveloped countries (barring political restrictions).

The real cost drivers would increasingly become energy, raw materials, and taxes. Large scale manufacturing should migrate to areas with a relative cost advantage for those factors, while lots of manufacturing becomes localized.

The bottom line is that the costs, and cycle times for manufactured goods will drop. Quality of life will improve, even if some improve faster than others.