Oh, more bad news: robots can already do that, and it will only be a few more years before the cleaning company we outsource to figures out how to exploit that

Oh, more bad news: robots can already do that, and it will only be a few more years before the cleaning company we outsource to figures out how to exploit that differential profitably. This is really a key point, I think. Automation is the means by which high-skill workers apply their productivity multipliers to what would otherwise be low-skill work. The technology already exists to automate large swathes of low-skill work; the only reason it's not already done is that, for the most part, low-skill workers are still cheaper, mostly due to the implicit coercion of things like "needing money to buy food". What happens when technology progresses to the point where robots are cheaper than paying someone minimum wage is a tricky question--and it's going to happen, probably in Japan first (thanks to both a high level of technological sophistication and an aversion to cheap immigrant labor).