You can build as many electric cars as you want, it's not going to resolve 8 hour workday or the cost of living crisis or the housing crisis. All of that is a social coordination problem, and the tools to resolve that will emerge from the humanities and the finance industry, not hard engineering.

Furthermore, people want those white-collar jobs you detest, and not everyone is inclined to R&D as this forum might think. The real problem is how technological progress has not been properly applied to improving white-collar productivity as opposed to just filtering, funnily enough of which this very thread is about regarding university.