Robotic Nation Evidence

I can't tell you how many people have said to me, "The economy will create plenty of new high-paying jobs. Just look at Biotech -- there's millions of new jobs that will be created in just that one industry!"

For some reason, people assume that Biotech jobs will not be automated with robots, and that all the jobs to be created in Biotech will stay within the boundaries of the United States.

These two articles are therefore interesting:

Testing the offshore waters / Biotech firms experiment with moving work overseas

From the article: "The nonprofit scientific research contractor SRI International [has] become an outspoken advocate of offshoring work to tech centers like Shanghai, where labor costs are a fraction of Bay Area rates."

Are biotech jobs next to go? Stronghold of Bay Area economy not immune to trend

From the article:

There are signs that the nation's biotech industry may be on the verge of an offshoring wave of its own, awakened to an international climate where firms can get qualified workers for as little as a tenth of the U.S. cost.

"Some of the best minds in biotech are in India,'' said Clyde Prestowitz, president of the Economic Strategy Institute in Washington, D.C. "You'd be foolish not to take advantage of them.''

A canvass of the Bay Area alone easily turns up biotech companies that are already testing the offshore waters. For example, Stanford University spin- off SRI International has an outsourcing deal with a research firm in Shanghai. South San Francisco's Genentech Inc., founder of the biotech industry, is manufacturing some supplies of an innovative cancer drug in Spain.

The fact is that all the mundane lab work can be done by robots. Many, if not most, of the non-automated jobs can be done for a tenth the cost by off-shoring them. And there it is. See Robotic Nation for details.