> what exactly is the barrier to taking all the humans previously doing those jobs and leveling them up to do jobs machines can't do as well?
One challenge with this that I rarely hear talked about is that many people aren't inclined to do those jobs. Here on HN, we tacitly assume that everyone loves intellectually challenging, mentally complex work, but that's simply not the case for many people. Lots of people prefer to use their hands, or their bodies, or to do jobs that are primarily social. Many (most?) people don't consider thinking to be a deep source of joy and satisfaction in their lives.
When we automate away the skilled manual labor jobs, we implicitly say that the only kind of being human that has value is brain work, but that is an absolute aberration in human history. For most of Homo sapiens evolutionary history, it was just as important to have physical and manual skills.
One challenge with this that I rarely hear talked about is that many people aren't inclined to do those jobs. Here on HN, we tacitly assume that everyone loves intellectually challenging, mentally complex work, but that's simply not the case for many people. Lots of people prefer to use their hands, or their bodies, or to do jobs that are primarily social. Many (most?) people don't consider thinking to be a deep source of joy and satisfaction in their lives.
When we automate away the skilled manual labor jobs, we implicitly say that the only kind of being human that has value is brain work, but that is an absolute aberration in human history. For most of Homo sapiens evolutionary history, it was just as important to have physical and manual skills.