One of the reasons I'm moving into jewelry and watches is that there's a value-add from hand-made craftsmanship, while there's also a big efficiency bump from automation. I, as a dude with a few tens of thousands of dollars worth of machine tools, can produce the same output as a workshop of 10-20 workers just a couple decades ago. For most product, however, things are so commoditized that any human involvement is met with curiosity or novelty. "You mean a person inspected my Snickers wrapper? How retro!" I think as a nation the United States likes to imagine their Chinese products as the result of an endless line of robots, rather than people folding boxes 10 hours a day. The talking heads have been pitching this whole "information" economy whereby it isn't about making stuff, it's about knowing stuff and I have no doubts that as AI becomes more predominant, a lot of those existing jobs are going to go away. And from the looks of it, Darwinism will sort out the new social order.“They always say it’s more than the stock price,” he said. “But in the end, if you screw up, you get fired.”