You made your point that the US has lost a lot of manufacturing jobs. However, that's not really relevant to other countries or new entrants, who don't care and

You made your point that the US has lost a lot of manufacturing jobs. However, that's not really relevant to other countries or new entrants, who don't care and are not following an industrial revolution inertial development path and may go straight from manual work to total automation. Fundamentally, automation is becoming cheaper, more generally applicable, more accessible, more manageable, more adaptable, and is available from more and more fiercely competitive suppliers. The large margins once commanded by leading suppliers are under threat. Huge factories may now be completely automated and are staffed by as little as three or four people to provide high-level supervision, security and anomalous event handling only. I suppose it is also probably true to generalize that the single line / critical-path flow of traditional facilities is being replaced by parallel, redundant lines which are explicitly designed to ensure graceful degradation instead of absolute failure. Future factories will self-assemble.