Everyone I know in business needs skilled labor, eg,
carpenters, electricians, arborists, mechanics.
Well, they can still hire people as trainees or apprentices, just like they did in the past.
In the long run, we're all dead.
But during the next couple generations, it'll be worth
training workers for trades. When your fully automated
future arrives, there'll be different solutions.
It may not last as long as two generations, though. Some people have had their jobs become technologically obsolete within their own lifetimes. Or, if not obsolete, they became economically non-viable because the same job could be done by someone overseas at a fraction of the price.
It's not that nobody actually needs these jobs anymore, because obviously, most of these low-skilled, low-wage jobs are clearly needed by society. As you say, we're not at a fully automated future yet. Yet, it's only for some emotional or cultural reason that people seem to believe that these jobs should be paid as little as possible. It apparently has very little to do with practical economics or even good business sense. "Penny wise and pound foolish."
Reminds me of an interview I heard on the radio once.
A gal described her herculean efforts to find a job...a
couple years of sending out hundreds of resumes.
No takers.
Then, near the end of the interview, she divulged that
her degree was in International Diversity Studies.
With such an education, one could could develop
some useful skills, eg, writing, research. But the
degree itself is pretty lame.
Maybe it is a lame degree, but one has to wonder why colleges and universities would even offer such utterly pointless and useless degrees. I mean, if it's purely for the sake of scholarly research, then it would only have value within academia or perhaps for government research. But even then, such positions would presumably be limited in number.