Seriously imagine how depressing life would be without human labor, I figure most of my human contact is at work or if I have to go out and buy something , or go out to eat , etc. It'd be a dull life.
In order for human labor to disappear everything would have to be done by robots. Everything. We would have to make a machine civilization that would end up similar to the matrix. Similar in that robots have either removed humans from the equation or they farm them. We will always need humans in control. The only way "human labor" is ever finished is if we just turn our selfs into androids and make it technically true.
what we really need is less consumption and a more fun work environment lol.. but i think human labor is important. its factory-in-china human labor that sucks. guy who builds toy sailboats for kids? fuck yea.
When we have a robot civilization that can do everything better than we can, much faster and 24-7. Also when we're mining asteroids in space for resources, along with having discovered infinite energy. Won't happen in our life-time unless something big comes along and pushes our knowledge forward. Our government could never be ran by humans, only a very advanced form of AI, seeing as how humans are straight up greedy, and given long enough any good government would become corrupted. Sounds pretty science fiction, but hey, we're at the start of the technology age. 20 years ago would anyone have thought we'd have handheld computers and TV's almost paper thin?
Automated labor will never replace human labor, it only serves to devalue it. Human labor's value is directly related to the cost to replace it with a machine. Which is only going to get cheaper because machines only get cheaper. (Trolls note that I am not trying to argue that human labor's value is a straight line that is always destined to go down... geeez.) At some point, human labor will be devalued to the point where a day's work is only worth a few bucks and a meal. Humans will give up their private homes, their social lives, their ambitions and will accept subsistence living in an employer owned dorm because it's marginally better than the alternative - dying in a gutter... It's voluntary, but only a tiny bit more so than previous forms of slavery. Pretty much any slave in history has had the capacity to kill themselves. To a Chinese factory worker, it's only the option of quitting and maybe working for another slave factory or going and dying peacefully in a gutter that makes it more voluntary. He can chose his master to some degree... maybe... but he can't escape the greater Cheap Chinese production paradigm. This is why we ARE already slaves to the machines. Machines aren't going to rise up and literally enslave humanity like the Matrix or Terminator. We'll just devalue our fellow human's lives to the point where they are a slave to their masters so that the minority who find themselves in a better situation can have an Iphone for about a week of their labor. Phone addicts who switch up to each latest model every 6 months and other similar consumption junkies have accepted that others live in bondage so that they might enjoy their toys. The value of gee-wiz phones have won out over value of Chinese lives. And now we are all slaves to our technology.