The recent advances in artificial intelligence, automatic learning, robotics and the constant reduction of automation costs, have generated strong economic incentives to replace human work with computerized equipment. The automation of the production of goods and services was implemented mainly in routine cognitive and manual activities. Today, rapid technological change and the advance of productive fragmentation blur the boundary between what is automatable and what is not, also advancing towards non-routine activities. Automation modifies the division of labor, increases productivity and generates an increase in income and demand. The possibility of radical technological change has triggered the alarms of technological unemployment. However, although automation displaces work, it also creates new industries (Karl Marx, 1867) by creating investment opportunities (Schumpeter, 1942) in new goods and services, and revolutionizing traditional industries. The main consequence of automation does not appear to be mass unemployment, but a significant change in the structure of employment.

In Mexico, maquila and export industrialization based on cheap labor became the industrialization strategy. This strategy is the one that is at risk today, the country could be trapped in automation of manufacturing without a clear strategy towards the development of new industries that fulfill a role in the absorption of labor force.