I just read the article it seems like technology is going to be big issue.
An independent question, how much Marx has you read?
If you think low wages overseas don't have anything to do with job loss you are wrong.
No, they certainly are. But let's not act like there aren't benefits to cheap labor. The real difficulty is that shifting the economy away from 20th manufacturing to 21st century manufacturing. But I think what we're seeing is technology's exponential increases happening too fast for economic shifts to even happen.
By the end of the century, 75% (a random guess) of the population won't even need to have a job.
Karl Marx's main point (at least early Marx), is that as technology increases, it replaces the worth of someone's work.
Back in the day, if you were a good farmer, you might produce 10X amount of crop and a bad farmer produced 3X crop. But now you've introduced machinery (which totally replaced horses), and a good farmer produces 100X crop and bad farmer produces 90X crop. Karl Marx makes the point that although productivity goes through the roof (and thus we crushed poverty as it was known), your "skill" as a worker was crushed too. In the 19th century it was agriculture, textiles, and light manufacturing. In the 20th century all of those proceeded, and heavy manufacturing was added to the list. In the 1980s onward we saw computers replace the need for so many secretaries and HR in general. In 2000s we saw things like legalzoom.com replace the need for a lot of lawyer work. We are seeing it in law and education now (online classes, recorded lectures, webcam).
Marx's reality is coming true, in the sense that once robots reach a certain point you won't need nearly ANYONE in a factory, Chinese or not. You'll need a few dozens repairmen (until they're are robots for those, lol). You won't need migrant workers, you'll have robots that can scan plants, pick weeds, vacuum harmful insects, etc.
The point of the article is that technology is on that tipping point. We simply don't need as many workers. In that sense, it has nothing to do with "low wages overseas," because even the Chinese will be replaced by robots who can work 22-hour days seven days a week for five years.
It's worth noting that one of the biggest reasons the Romans never accidentally had an industrial revolution is that they had slaves. Cheap, cheap labor that was basically endless due to all of the wars. They knew what steam power was, they knew enough math. They were certainly smart enough to accidentally put it all together. The moment the robot price equilibrium comes below that of Indian/Mexican/Chinese workers (which is raising), another massive industrial revolution is coming.
