"Yet if you look at what the West has offshored it's manufacturing, customer service, IT support, etc. All areas that are amenable to automation" No. All of th

"Yet if you look at what the West has offshored it's manufacturing, customer service, IT support, etc. All areas that are amenable to automation" No. All of those are areas are very unamenable to automation. * The west hasn't offshored manufacturing that it could automate. It automated it and kept it at home. The manufacturing it couldn't automate went offshore, provided the QC / lead times didn't completely fuck the product (e.g. apparel / cheap plastic toys / electronics / etc.). * Customer service is fundamentally unautomateable since it's mostly dealing with problems (have you automated fixing bugs in your code yet? if so, maybe there's hope) and people who just want to talk to a human when they buy things. Moreover, you suffer massive quality issues when offshoring it, which is why the companies that do offshore only survive the quality hit because they don't need to be competitive. Comcast outsources its call centers; Netflix keeps them at home. * IT support is similar - most of the time you're dealing with IT issues, dealing with people and dealing with the broken way people deal with their IT issues. Again, generic, high level problem solving that involves a great deal of human interaction is just about the last thing that will ever be automated.