Reading through an interesting article of Marcel Warmerdam at Metisfiles: "The future of work: the rise of the machines". Of course, automation and the very role of robots in our production economy has been increasing steadily for the past hundred years. But Marcel's point is that it is likely to accelerate and will soon make all human production work redundant. The reason for this? Even in the manufacturing powerhouses like China the wages get to such a level where it becomes more profitable to make machines do the work.
Taking this one step further, I would argue that humans would still be needed to design and build the machines that create physical things, and others to maintain and repair them. It is likely that the first group will be highly regarded -and rewarded, while the second group will be 'worth' less than the machines they maintain. The gap between rich and poor is likely to widen unless we rethink the concept of work itself -and unless our educational system adapt in order to enable people to conceive of work differently.
But wait a minute... is it really be necessary to have people involved even in designing and maintaining machines that build things? Perhaps I'm even over-optimistic on that front. Watching this TED lecture of Skylar Tibbits, about self evolving (and repairing) things, I'd have to conclude that somewhere in the future producing things would not require any human involvement at all:
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