No, there won't be "a lot" of jobs maintaining machines. My brother-in-law works in such job, his department of 30 or so engineers setup and maintain 100+ factories worldwide (all of them for this specific product). My WAG is that fully automated assembly replaces approximately 300 jobs per factory, times 100 factories worldwide all maintained by 30 engineers or 1:1000 ratio. IMO, at such ratio it doesn't really matter where these factories located and 30 jobs won't save Flint Michigan, even if they are well-paid.

Next robotic vision (recognizing objects in 3D) breakthrough and manufacturing workforce is done. This tech will be adapted from self-driving cars. We are at most 5 years away from this, then 10 years for adoption/ gradual roll out. We already have adequate digital cameras thanks to selfie addiction, so it is software-only problem and Silicon Valley will surely deliver.

As to factories - cheapest electricity and least environmental regulation is where they will be located. So China for now, but it isn't like it would be overly hard to pack equipment and move it somewhere.

The only way for us to prepare for this is to invest into development or power grid and build more nuclear reactors to increase capacity. So we can compete based on cheap electricity.

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