Hmmm I see what you mean, I was thinking about robots made of steel, running on electricity with some efficiency greater than humans. Sort of like the used car

Hmmm I see what you mean, I was thinking about robots made of steel, running on electricity with some efficiency greater than humans. Sort of like the used car bodies getting crushed in dumps, like we have basically unlimited amounts of iron and whatever remaining fossil fuels would go to run industry instead of feeding people. And then one mechanic could maintain dozens or hundreds of machines and multiply his or her productivity many times. But you bring up a good point, about how if natural resources are in decline, we may be headed back to an agrarian society (which incidentally is not productive enough to feed more than about 1 or 2 billion people, so most of the world would starve). To me, a future in which people are still engaged in manual labor is one where technology has stopped improving or even failed. For example, I’m shocked that people still pick crops by hand. Some of that is propped up by immigration laws and being able to pay farm workers below minimum wage. Otherwise someone surely would have automated it by now. But then, I could say the same thing about almost any manual labor (somewhere along the line, the dignity of manual labor and the compensation we pay for it diverged, so almost all of it pays less now than we think it does, and is declining).