The Singularity Is Nearer: When We Merge with AI

by Ray Kurzweil

Then two technology-related shifts began to erode US factory employment. First, innovations in logistics and transportation, most notably containerized shipping, made it cheaper for companies to outsource manufacturing to countries with less expensive labor and import finished products to the United States.[55] Containerization is not a flashy technology like factory robotics or AI, but it has had one of the most profound impacts on modern society of any innovation. By drastically reducing the cost of worldwide shipping, containerization made it possible for the economy to become truly global. This made an enormous range of products available more cheaply to ordinary people, but it was also a key factor in the deindustrialization of large parts of the United States. Second, automation reduced the amount of human labor demanded by the domestic manufacturing sector. While early assembly lines involved significant hands-on work at each step, the introduction of robotics reduced this need. That trend was reinforced in the 1990s as computerization and artificial intelligence started making automation ever more capable and efficient. Thus, the average manufacturing worker, assisted by smarter machines, could produce more and more goods every hour.