There are still many menial jobs that cannot be automated (not cost effectively). Encouraging people with menial jobs to seek higher effective wages increases

There are still many menial jobs that cannot be automated (not cost effectively). Encouraging people with menial jobs to seek higher effective wages increases everyone's cost of living. Until robots can do all the menial work, and build themselves too, a lot of people are going to have shit jobs. I don't see any way around that. Philosophically, is it better to have more people each doing X hours/yr of menial work, rather than fewer people doing X+n hours/yr of menial work? In the spirit of the recent thread about EVE, it seems to me that the impulse which game makers depend on to keep people playing games, particularly MMOs, is similar to the impulse that keeps people doing menial jobs. Both involve long hours spent doing uninteresting work, and rare random rewards. People are conditioned to feel good about getting through tedious real work as long as they get occasional random high-value rewards (salary or praise or both).