What I and a few others were saying above is that there will always be manual labor jobs. Always. Maybe in the very far future, humans will no longer move, but do everything with their minds (isn’t that what the Scientologists preach?). But that’s a loooooong way away.
I personally think that as automation becomes more prevalent, people will lose their basic fitness level. Some will gain it back by going to a gym and exercising, but many of us will just get softer and weaker. What this means is that those people who are capable of performing manual labor will become MORE valuable as all the rest of us become physically weaker. This means we will pay MORE for them to repair our machines, care for our landscaping, farm, clean, drive, defend us against crime and our enemies, etc.
An example of this–at the beginning of the summer, I volunteered to host a young woman from out of the country and of course, I wanted my house to be clean. My house is neat, but the floors were pretty grimy after a long winter, and because of my arthritic knees, I have a very hard time cleaning them thoroughly. So…I hired a friend of mine who owns a cleaning business. She did a super job and we paid her as much as I make working in a hospital tech job! We plan to hire her on a regular basis several times a year–in two hours, she can do what would take me all day to do, and she does a much better job and doesn’t end up on the sofa with ice on her painful knees like I do!
