The pace of technological improvement in manufacturing will slow. Let me make that broader: the pace of all technological improvement will slow. Rapid tech advancement requires a large body of highly skilled workers, the opportunities for large-scale collaboration among those workers, and a metric butt-ton of capital to pay for the development, operationalization, and application of new ideas. Demographic collapse is gutting the first, deglobalization is fracturing the second, and the combined pair are ending the third.
