"I have often wondered whether free trade of goods has retarded the development of more sophisticated automation & robotics."
I doubt the effect has been that profound. From what I can see of the history of robots and automation, the choke point over the past 50 years has not been cheap labor, but expensive real-time computation. We only recently got CPUs that we could really do anything with. Even 320x200x15fps in black and white, a resolution you'd have a hard time actually "living" in as your only sensory input (and if humans find it hard, computers even moreso), is about a million things a second. When you've got processors running at 33MHz, it's hard to get very far, just as one example.
I doubt the effect has been that profound. From what I can see of the history of robots and automation, the choke point over the past 50 years has not been cheap labor, but expensive real-time computation. We only recently got CPUs that we could really do anything with. Even 320x200x15fps in black and white, a resolution you'd have a hard time actually "living" in as your only sensory input (and if humans find it hard, computers even moreso), is about a million things a second. When you've got processors running at 33MHz, it's hard to get very far, just as one example.