It's funny that the other comments here prove your point, egh.
They miss that the contempt is not directed at those doing the work but instead directed at the skills-- this is evidenced by how they tend to trivialize the skills that are trying to be automated.
This is especially true when looking at the spectrum of quality of human work for a given field. Take, for example, masonry. There is simple bricklaying for the front of the house. Then there is intricate stonemasonry that requires a lot of careful planning, know-how, and knowledge of historical techniques.
There is machining a piece of metal in a simple way. Then there is intricate hand-finishing of that metal at the other extreme.
I suspect that over time we will see the less artisan, less "skillful" aspects of manual work be replaced but that fine craftsmanship won't really disappear. The more you learn about what goes into making certain things by hand the more you appreciate how foolish it is to claim that it can all be automated easily.
There's also machining a piece of metal in an incredibly complex way, but with the right automation can be turned into a comparatively simple process. If you showed someone 100 years ago what we could do with a block of metal and a 5-axis CNC machine it would blow their mind. That's the type of area where automation can do great things. Look for places where "simple for a machine" and "simple for a human" diverge.
I could do the job of every logic gate in my computer, but I wouldn't want to try and boot a copy of Windows with a pad of paper and a pencil.
But to look at something that's easy to do for people and think "That's easy, a machine could do it!" It's always going to depend on why it's easy. Handling situations that differ from one job to the next is a pretty strong point for humans, especially when those differences are handled by grabbing and moving things.
But then, five years ago we would've put "playing Go" on there with grabbing and moving things, so you never know.
They miss that the contempt is not directed at those doing the work but instead directed at the skills-- this is evidenced by how they tend to trivialize the skills that are trying to be automated.
This is especially true when looking at the spectrum of quality of human work for a given field. Take, for example, masonry. There is simple bricklaying for the front of the house. Then there is intricate stonemasonry that requires a lot of careful planning, know-how, and knowledge of historical techniques.
There is machining a piece of metal in a simple way. Then there is intricate hand-finishing of that metal at the other extreme.
I suspect that over time we will see the less artisan, less "skillful" aspects of manual work be replaced but that fine craftsmanship won't really disappear. The more you learn about what goes into making certain things by hand the more you appreciate how foolish it is to claim that it can all be automated easily.