They will come back in the long tail of manufacturing. You'll buy a standard Toyota made by robots in Nevada for $8,000. But if you want to spend $50,000 you c

They will come back in the long tail of manufacturing. You'll buy a standard Toyota made by robots in Nevada for $8,000. But if you want to spend $50,000 you can get a custom car, with lots of parts manufactured in house. There will be single humans who build a car from scratch using a couple of robot "helping hands". There will be a car company that uses no robotic tools, using only carefully designed winches, with a car designed specifically for ease of human construction. There will be a competition to build a complete car from scratch as fast as possible. There will be cars that are unique to Paris, cars that are unique to Arkansas, and cars that are unique Long Beach. Teenagers will make cars as a science fair project. There are all kinds of interesting opportunities for things to flip flop. Robots take away easy work, but they make many more kinds of new work easy. I know it is easy to think "what's happening now will be the trend forever!" and robot manufacturing is in fact a major trend, but history is complicated and after robiticization the next phase will look very different again.