The question seems to be, will those manual jobs be valued and economically rewarded, or will automation increasingly concentrate wealth into smaller and smaller groups while manual work will be low paying with low social mobility.

Depends on the supply of labor for those manual jobs. Jobs that require skill and/or have low quality of life at work such as requiring traveling/crawl spaces/outdoors/sewers/dangerous machinery/hazardous materials will probably pay well.

Manual jobs that are relatively safe, close to home, steady, and easy to learn will probably have a lot of people vying for them, hence lower pay.

As in "Manual jobs that weren't made obsolete in the previous automation revolution" I suppose ? Like construction machines and lavor-saving tools ? On the top of my head I am thinking hair dresser, nail care (I wouldn't risk going to hair dresser or barber robot shop).

Manual mid-range jobs were the first that were automated, due to the industrial revolution, and later during the robotics revolution.

They've been automated for so long and so thoroughly that you didn't even think of them as 'having been automated away'.

Look at any commercial kitchen, any farm, inside any factory. Look at the grocery store, and its self-checkout machines. Look at parking attendants and toll booths. Look at the labour-saving devices employed at any construction site. Look at the demise of cottage industries - which used to be the economic driver of productive output, and are now limited to kitschy crafts on Etsy. Look at the cargo-container shipping yard, where a hundred dock-workers are now do the work that used to take tens of thousands. Look at the answering machine, and the utter insanity that is the modern automated customer support directory.

What hasn't been automated are jobs like janitors - where the work that they do is highly varied, and requires manipulation of different tools, in different spaces. We can automate a floor-mopping machine, or a vaccum cleaner, but we can't (yet) build a robot that will vaccum, and water the plants, and scrub a toilet, and clean up vomit, and refill the paper towel dispenser, all in one package.

> grocery store, and its self-checkout machines

Which aren’t automation or even new technology. The stores just cleverly moved the work that must be done to unpaid laborers. The self-checkout machines are an inferior tool with an escape hatch (customer service is on the way) to the real tool which must be operated by an employee.

Surely the ability to easily type and search for items is new technology. Customers do not have to memorize the codes, they can look them up.

I find self checkout very beneficial, as I frequently have few items to purchase, and there are more self checkout registers available more consistently than there would be staff.

> For the same ~20 to 30 items I normally purchase, it takes me very little time to self checkout. For people with cartloads of items, they can go to the manned conveyor belts. For everyone else, they can go to one of the many self checkouts.

Except if they have never used self checkout before. Or if they have 15 items in the store's cart but they haven't brought their shopping bags so they take 15 minutes to fill their arms and pockets and hats with their groceries.

Those people are eating time saved by self-checkout !

I tolerate the young ones who comes in pack of 6 individuals, especially if only one of them buy their unique can of coke. It makes the queue looks longer than it is and I am out sooner than the SUCKERS in the other queue.

HA ! (/s ? /s)

Sure, but in my experience, there are so many self checkout stalls that I never have to wait long.