There is not enough history to give us the context for what this means.
People like to bring out truisms of horse and buggy drivers, but we're getting to the point where we're thinking of automating entire classes of jobs out of existence rapidly, not just specific tradesmen one at a time. Where in the past manual labor has been automated, it has tended to happen slowly, increasing efficiencies in niches and eliminating some tasks completely. This has freed people to engage in - by and large - other sorts of manual labor, those which were not so trivially automated.
What happens when the very notion of "manual labor" is itself abolished? There's no historical precedent for that.
Automation will likely not eliminate all manual labor in our lifetimes, but I imagine it will eliminate enough of it to break capitalism for large portions of the population. We need to start considering what that means sooner, rather than later.
Well stated. A phrase that comes to mind is that "Over time, a quantitate change becomes a qualitative change."
Take Moore's law for example. The doubling of transistors/halving of their expense first allowed more efficient computation in the original manner, but now that qualitative change has started to alter the very nature of computation- omnipresent computation in all man made devices doesn't mean our spreadsheets run faster, but rather humanity exchanges information and communicates in an entirely different manner than it did a generation ago.
Likewise, I believe we'll see the gradual automation of 'useless' jobs change from an event we can work around by retraining or switching careers to an obsolescence of the vast majority of human labor. There are some nagging statistics about unemployed engineers that I believe back my assumption, especially considering that engineering positions should be the new careers people retrain to.
People like to bring out truisms of horse and buggy drivers, but we're getting to the point where we're thinking of automating entire classes of jobs out of existence rapidly, not just specific tradesmen one at a time. Where in the past manual labor has been automated, it has tended to happen slowly, increasing efficiencies in niches and eliminating some tasks completely. This has freed people to engage in - by and large - other sorts of manual labor, those which were not so trivially automated.
What happens when the very notion of "manual labor" is itself abolished? There's no historical precedent for that.
Automation will likely not eliminate all manual labor in our lifetimes, but I imagine it will eliminate enough of it to break capitalism for large portions of the population. We need to start considering what that means sooner, rather than later.