Historically it's been the other way round. Human labor has been profoundly cheap for most of human history, whether through work levies or slavery (or, today,

Historically it's been the other way round. Human labor has been profoundly cheap for most of human history, whether through work levies or slavery (or, today, wage slavery). Rich Westerners had live-in servants for centuries past slavery because they were cheap. In the West, such labor is not now expensive because A Wizard Did It; it's expensive because we decided that people deserve a life of some minimal standard and shouldn't be in thrall to one rich family their entire lives. (This doesn't always work. The delta in cost speaks for itself, and to the positive. It's a better goal than the alternative and you never find the people who'd be that underclass doing the advocacy for a return to it.) The results of extremely specialized labor shouldn't be conflated with the work of humanity at large.