>The human cost of building those factories, and maintaining them, is 1% of what the hand labor used to be. Yes, if we still built the old stuff, but we don't.

>The human cost of building those factories, and maintaining them, is 1% of what the hand labor used to be. Yes, if we still built the old stuff, but we don't. We're building better factories for more sophisticated technology. Factories are tools and they've improved just the same as every other tool. Their complexity has increased immensely. Sure, nowadays it still takes less effort to build the factory, but all the things that the factory makes needs a lot more work. Scientists, engineers, software developers, lawyers, PR people etc. I think almost all businesses are going to remain unautomated. Sure, significant parts of the processes will be automated, but not everything. Complexity will keep increasing and we'll likely still need humans to coordinate, because we're not very good at automating the unknown.