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The real impact of automation has not been truly felt yet...Mostly it's been labor substitution. Also the extra costs (in time as well as money) involved in a long production chain has been minimised in this discussion.
I'd like to use a low-tech example. The clothes you're (usually) wearing.
Today clothes are made (mostly) in low wage countries, in large runs, to minimise the costs. They are then shipped (slowly, because slow shipping is the cheapest) to the retail chain in an advanced country where they are sold.
You go in and pick the one that hopefully fits well, and has the color and material that you want. Or at least something somewhat close.
What happens when you have a machine (or a small set of machines) that takes your measurement, cuts the fabric (from a choice of a 1000 different fabrics) and sews them together according to one of a 100,000 different patterns available. With a turnaround of less than 24 hours?
That'll kill the cheap labor advantage. And there will be no reason to put those machines half a world away. The shipping costs (money and time) will be more than any marginal cost saving.
(Foxconn claims it is going to add a million robots to it's assembly force in the next three years. In the long haul, will it matter where those robots are located?
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