As a man who worked in OEM electronics for 10 years, I can say, automation will not help USA a dime.
There are far richer Asian countries than China, business people with far more capital to buy fancy tooling. You think they never tried that? They did, and it didn't work largely, or the impact was minimal. Look at Malaysia, or Taiwan.
Hopes on robots, and automation as an economic "Wunderwaffe" is plainly silly, and are largely coming from people who haven't put in a single nail in their life. Don't listen to these men who say that.
100% agreed, as someone who’s automated manufacturing lines, the problem of automation is beyond just robotics. It’s automation with high reliability, yield, less downtime, high throughput, low costs and have to beat humans in the long tail of weird situations. The reason why your home printer can separate sheets of paper and only pick one sheet at a time is nothing short of a miracle backed by thousands of hours of engineering and years of failures. That said, some applications are very easy and we could automate effortlessly (Pick-and-place tools for example in PCB manufacturing).
I don't know about robotics and manufacturing. What i know is that I saved thousands of work hours for different companies by just a few lines of code in the few years I worked in this field.
I don't see how automation will save anyone's economy, but it surely will put a always growing dent in the economy
Electronics are a particularly complicated thing to manufacture, though.
I know an engineer who started a small business (in the USA) that makes specialized types of plastic-coated copper wiring. The process is 90% automated and runs around the clock. He keeps two employees on at all times, but they basically just change spools and then hang out and watch the machines.
I wonder why we can't seem to invest in the future (in the USA).