Over the past thirty years, a lot of the "technology" has been Chinese people building things overseas and shipping it to the US. There's technology in that, bu

Over the past thirty years, a lot of the "technology" has been Chinese people building things overseas and shipping it to the US. There's technology in that, but it's mostly logistics and shipping, not robots or anything fancy. NB: I'm not saying automation doesn't matter, or that it won't matter going forward. I'm saying that if no automation had happened at all, we'd almost certainly still be in this situation. The bulk of the distribution changes result from human decisions, not tech.