> Nonetheless, the workers' movement was once dedicated to the eventual abolition of all menial, tedious, grinding work. We have the machines to make that a rea

> Nonetheless, the workers' movement was once dedicated to the eventual abolition of all menial, tedious, grinding work. We have the machines to make that a reality today – but none of the will. No, we do not have such machines. While we have made big strides in getting machines to do menial labor, the fact is that 1. There are huge amounts of menial labor that we simply cannot make sophisticated-enough machines to do. Humans are still necessary for many menial jobs. (If they weren't, they would have been replaced long ago with cheaper machines.) While we can land robots on mars, we still do not have the technology to, for example, clean our entire house using robotic labor. Achieving that would require solving some very hard problems in robotics, but humans can just do those types of work with hardly any training. 2. The amount of labor required keeps increasing, as the standard of living goes up. People expect more and more. We do everything we can with machine labor, but then we can get humans to do work machines cannot that further improves our quality of living, so we do that. For that reason it seems unlikely that human labor will vanish until robots can literally do everything humans can, which we are nowhere close to.