Computer people tend to work in office settings. The reason the old joke about threatening to replace people with shell scripts works is because a lot of office jobs can be replaced with shell scripts. This is because, rather than physically working in the real world, most office jobs entail manipulating symbols, which is easy for computers but hard for humans. (That's why we invented computers).
A lot of work in the real world entails some decision-making component that can be expressed in terms of symbol manipulation. This overlaps with the part that many people find difficult, because people are naturally good at physically manipulating the real world. So when we talk about automating driving or picking tomatoes or bricklaying, we are only accounting for the difficulty of automating the symbol-manipulation abstraction of that task.
(This is basically the conceit of "Manna", a science fiction story where a ton of jobs are "automated" by a computer that just gives a continuous stream of verbal instructions to a poorly paid human being.)
If you're measuring the skills of manual workers against the standard of how hard it is to build a robot that replaces them, they are surprisingly hard. The same is true for the skills of trained animals. Maybe we should start worrying about replacing human beings with robots after we've managed to figure out how to replace dogs with robots. Once we have enough bomb-sniffing robots, drug-sniffing robots, livestock guardian robots, police pursuit robots, search and rescue robots, and so forth, to the point where we don't need dogs, then maybe we can start to worry about the human jobs. (Or maybe not--dogs have a really good sense of smell that might be harder to replicate than some human capacities.)
Computer people tend to work in office settings. The reason the old joke about threatening to replace people with shell scripts works is because a lot of office jobs can be replaced with shell scripts. This is because, rather than physically working in the real world, most office jobs entail manipulating symbols, which is easy for computers but hard for humans. (That's why we invented computers).
A lot of work in the real world entails some decision-making component that can be expressed in terms of symbol manipulation. This overlaps with the part that many people find difficult, because people are naturally good at physically manipulating the real world. So when we talk about automating driving or picking tomatoes or bricklaying, we are only accounting for the difficulty of automating the symbol-manipulation abstraction of that task.
(This is basically the conceit of "Manna", a science fiction story where a ton of jobs are "automated" by a computer that just gives a continuous stream of verbal instructions to a poorly paid human being.)
If you're measuring the skills of manual workers against the standard of how hard it is to build a robot that replaces them, they are surprisingly hard. The same is true for the skills of trained animals. Maybe we should start worrying about replacing human beings with robots after we've managed to figure out how to replace dogs with robots. Once we have enough bomb-sniffing robots, drug-sniffing robots, livestock guardian robots, police pursuit robots, search and rescue robots, and so forth, to the point where we don't need dogs, then maybe we can start to worry about the human jobs. (Or maybe not--dogs have a really good sense of smell that might be harder to replicate than some human capacities.)