I think that, generally, the people who work low skill jobs aren’t in those jobs because they’re strictly incapable of doing more, they have other things holding them back. Some of it could be ambition, various health/mental/addiction problems, lack of opportunity, interests other than their job, etc. I do think that automation will slowly chip away at the number of low skill jobs available. The biggest problem as I see it is that, as those jobs decrease, the demand for them goes up, so the market price for them goes down, and with increasing cost for employment, it just creates more incentive to automate jobs, and the vicious cycle continues.
I think there’s a few solutions to this problem. I don’t think these jobs are going to just disappear in the coming decades, it will take time to build infrastructure, and labor is still ridiculously cheap elsewhere. It may cost jobs in developed countries in the short-term, but all it means is that the jobs will move. So those in the low-skill labor market will be faced with a choice of fewer job prospects, moving to another location where there’s more and possibly lower cost of living, or getting additional skills to move up.
The cheap labor market won’t last forever, eventually the labor in places like China will no longer be cheap enough to make it worth the added cost of maintaining factories overseas and ship things here. This is inevitable as China continues to industrialize and the cost of living increases, along with the increased cost of fuel. This, of course, can continue for a time, moving to less and less developed areas or other countries, but it can’t carry on forever.
To take it to the extreme, in the more distant future, we may eventually be able to automate most or all of the cheap labor, like a Star Trek type of world. In this hypothetical world, it may be that the only jobs left are creative/artistic types of jobs, and other highly skilled types. What do we do with unskilled labor in such a world? There it might make sense, with so much automation, to enact some sort of socialized support ideas, as they would be really cheap, and people doing those sorts of jobs would likely be doing so more because they really want to than because they need to. In short, society will HAVE to provide for them ethically, even if a free-market, libertarian society, it makes less sense not to, because it’s virtually free, and even without bringing ethics into it, it’s less of a burden to provide something that is nearly free than deal with the consequences of the desperate populations by depriving them.
I bring this up, because perhaps in times past, it made sense to put the onus on everyone to provide for themselves because it took nearly all of a person’s effort just to provide for himself and his family. But as technology improves, we need less effort to produce more. This inevitably creates this imbalance where there’s not enough work to go around to produce everything that we need. So we either produce more luxuries, which is much of how we’ve expended that effort thus far, we just work less, or we start becoming more generous.
The problem is, I think we’re getting to a point where we can see the most effective people creating enough for themselves to have everything they need, almost everything they want, and still having enough left over, so it’s pushing out the lowest people creating the wealth gap. For now, we can get away with it, but I do think we’ll see it come to a head in time.
Frankly, I think the best thing to do is to change how society looks at these things. If we expend some resources to help train and educate people, to help them address their problems, and fill the gaps in their ability to provide for themselves, they’ll end up more productive too. If some people who have all their needs and most of their wants are willing to provide work for others, they too can be productive. Unfortunately, I don’t see us reaching a point where this has to happen because such a significant number, possibly even into the majority, is marginalized that they HAVE to provide those things in the same way that they inherently do in the Star Trek scenario.
Frankly, I think it’s worth starting to lay the groundwork now and working towards solving these problems, it may be more costly now, but we’ll end up better off sooner if we do.