Why The Emphasis on Automating Blue Collar Jobs?

There are a handful of YouTube videos of machines that perform the tasks of skilled tradesmen. For example, there's a bricklaying robot that would ostensibly replace a bricklayer. However, if you watch the video and analyze the scenarios where that machine will work, you'll see it's got fairly limited application. It needs a construction site that's carefully prepared, and wide open to allow the robot to function correctly, for example. On top of that, it needs a crew of workers to maintain it, to accept brick deliveries, to load it up, etc... It's really only eliminating a fraction of the overall work that's required to build a brick wall but it's probably expensive to develop and maintain.

I think that's probably true of almost all trades. In certain tasks, where the environment is totally controlled, and the task is really repetitive and mechanical, automation is pretty "easy". In most trades, like carpentry, plumbing, electrical work, welding, concrete, the environment is not controlled at all and the tradesman has to solve problem after problem to complete their job. That work will be nearly impossible to automate. In spite of that, there seems to be an emphasis on automating tasks, like driving a truck, that are extremely difficult to automate--and probably won't really ever work.

By contrast the typical administrative or managerial job is easy to automate in most industries. A worker at a bank, for example, is really a database field editor. Their job is already automated. They remain as a human face on a computer program. Similarly, a large portion of the time people spend at work in corporate jobs is involved in makework tasks. If "automation" is really about reducing labor costs or increasing efficiency, it would make way more sense to automate away all the clerical and administrative overhead of corporate and government life.

Imagine all the waste involved in the operation of the financial system, or the tax system, or the insurance industry, or hospital billing. Those industries consume a sizable fraction of the economy. Any one of those systems could be streamlined overnight compared to the effort involved in automating truck driving. Millions of man hours go into tax preparation every year, for example, and involve the operation of computers, printers, etc... It's a less than useless task. Car insurance could be completely automatic.

The effort to automate blue collar jobs is driven, apparently, by spite and something resembling actual "racism" or hatred of a type of person. I think it's also driven by something resembling self-loating or fear of being discovered in a con. An industry like the auto insurance industry or banking are really based on scams, while carpentry, for example, is based on necessity. Automation and disenfranchising all the blue collar workers is sort of like building a fortress around the frauds.