The loss of manufacturing jobs was a key issue in the presidential campaign, with a lot of the blame going to free trade and outsourcing, but technology and automation are an even bigger part of the story, says a reporter covering jobs and the economy.

Claire Cain Miller has written a series of pieces about the impact of automation on manufacturing and other jobs in the United States, and she found technology is having a much greater impact than outsourcing. As she put it in one of her headlines: "The long-term jobs killer is not China. It's automation."

"Over the long term it's not even close," said Miller. "Economists say automation and technology have had a much much bigger impact than anything to do with globalization."

A Ball State University study that tried to pinpoint the balance of blame found automation accounted for about 87 percent of manufacturing job loss, and about 13 percent was the result of free-trade deals and globalization.

According to the Federal Reserve, U.S. manufacturing output is near a record high, while manufacturing jobs have been in a major decline. So when you hear someone say, 'America doesn't make anything anymore,' Miller said that's just not true. America's making things, it's just getting a hand, or a robotic arm.

"The steel industry is one example," Miller said. "It's lost 75 percent of its workforce since 1962. Production and shipments have not changed at all. And the reason is that robots are doing these jobs now."

As far as the manufacturing sector is concerned, the biggest job losses concerned those who were performing what might be called "routine" duties, said Miller.

"Those are things that are the easiest to program a machine to do," she said. "Things like loading items onto a conveyer belt or stocking items into regular-sized boxes. These are the kinds of things that are very predictable work."

But automation and technology affects plenty of other jobs, too. Secretaries who once filed actual paperwork into cabinets are now largely replaced by Microsoft Office. ATMs have replaced actual bank tellers. There are automated checkout lines at the grocery store.

"There's even robots who are administering anesthesia, so an anesthesiologist is a very highly educated, very highly trained doctor obviously, and robots are even learning to do those jobs," Miller said.

This isn't a trend that is going to change anytime soon. The next big change could come with the new wave of driverless cars. Is it only a matter of time before long-haul truckers, which represent some of the largest share of the workforce in many states, are replaced by GPS programming?

"The thing about technological progress is it always moves forward. It doesn't really stall or move backward. And frankly, no one is really suggesting that it should," Miller said.