Hexhammer wrote:
I don't belive that manual labour will perish because of technological advancement. It will probably become more like a luxury / high priced thing in the future.
Tehcnological advancements have made many things a lot cheaper and easier to manufacture and there are less professional people with the know how to handcraft various items. But it's not going to die out, I don't think so.
One example of this is musical instruments. In past they all were hand made, in last three decades or so, cheap, industrial made instruments have become the norm, but still the top tier stuff is hand made, more or less and there's a definite culture of supporting the handcrafting in instument making. Of course the instruments made the old fashioned way are VERY expensive, but the quality of good handcrafting has not been surpassed by technology... But the factory tech to make that stuff has become very good indeed.
I think there will always be a market for anything hand crafted, be it a house or a musical instrument. Technology has just marginalized the 'old way' of building stuff and made it higly valued and high priced.
It's not that it will perish, but it will logically evolve as technology advances to fit around the most economical methods with maximum profits. Ultimately that's what will drive any labour market. That's obviously nothing new, as labour markets have continuously adapted to technology advances for however long. Although its rate of advancement places a burden on becoming multi-skilled for the labourer. There is obviously always the idea that machines build machines to make much human labour totally redundant in many respects.
