It's not AI. I can hire QA automation Sr level for $10 usd in Argentina... you wouldn't want to work at Walmart for that.
The US government has to do something, or its Knowledge Worker market will keep suffering.
(And I say this as someone outside the US that had benefitted from this)
That's exactly it. Workers in countries with high cost of living are competing with those in the global south. We are going to lose every time. Something should be done (but probably won't) or the knowledge worker will have the same fate as the American industrial worker.
I wonder what could be done about it. I suppose regulations like in the defense industry could be applied more broadly.
We didn't do anything about manufacturing being off-shored and it was even seen as a benefit by many, allowing the freed up labor to focus on higher skilled work (mostly). However, there doesn't seem to be a replacement this time for the labor to move into. I wonder if we've reached a point where automation and other technological improvements have created a global negative trend in required labor.