Tech shocks to industry have only just begun

The disruption that is hitting the manufacturing sector could come for healthcare next.

- Rana Foroohar

A few weeks ago, I had one of those "blink" moments that changed my view of the labour market in America. I was in a shipbuilding factory in Marinette, Wisconsin, owned by the Italian company Fincantieri. Among other things, they build giant frigates for the US Navy, vessels that are more than 120m long and many storeys high.

It used to take hundreds of men years to do the kind of metal bending this takes. But in this massive building, a little more than the size of a football field, I counted fewer than two dozen workers. They were directing robotic welding arms to carve massive pieces of steel in a fraction of the time that hand blasting takes. Virtual-reality helmets helped them to exactly match construction on new builds to parts yet to be fitted, something that used to involve guesswork and paper blueprints. Even painters were wearing sci-fi type "exosuits" (think Matt Damon in the movie Elysium) to make their jobs exponentially easier and more comfortable.

If this is what's happening in shipbuilding, one of the more antiquated industries around, think about the potential of technology to change the industrial workplace over the next few years.

We already know that it has had a greater impact on manufacturing jobs than even outsourcing to China did. The two factors have together radically transformed the employment map of the US. In 1990, manufacturing was the biggest employer in most states. Today, it's top only in Wisconsin, Michigan, Iowa, Alabama, Kentucky and my own home state of Indiana.