Most light manufacturing remains human-operated, though - I'm thinking the 200-person widget factories in Shenzhen or 50-person tailoring shops in Vietnam. They

Most light manufacturing remains human-operated, though - I'm thinking the 200-person widget factories in Shenzhen or 50-person tailoring shops in Vietnam. They don't typically make a small range of products on a mass scale, but many slightly varied products on a small scale, with an irregular schedule of orders. My guess is the electronics factories, car factories and the like, found machines were a worthy investment to improve precision and quality control. For many industries, a semi-skilled human at developing country wages is a better deal than a robot. Even lower-middle class professions like teaching, nursing, policing, office admin, etc are much less routine than people realise. (Tech is obsessed with the idea of, e.g., replacing teachers with e-learning software, but what usually happens is that the teachers end up using the e-learning software as another tool to do their job). Vehicle automation is one large area I can genuinely see becoming automated (possibly the success in this area is because the AI doesn't need to manipulate the environment, just navigate through it). There are still many blue collar jobs which are really hard to automate - cleaning, gardening, building maintenance, etc, etc. (Honestly, I see the most likely outcome being that first world countries develop a grey-market, third-world economy, where low-income people work cash-in-hand, below-minimum-wage jobs running cheap food stalls, cleaning laundry, or offering other convenience services on the cheap. It's not as utopian as everyone getting a basic income and using their unlimited free time to paint watercolours, but it works out as a more robust social safety net).