I thought the twitter list of ethical questions about sex robots was fascinating in the ways it asked some very real questions about this.
The change that I continue to watch for is not when robots are used to do an undesirable job, but instead they are used to do a desirable one. I suspect the first hints of that are programs that write sports copy for newspapers. I have known a couple of sports writers over the years and they really liked what they did, and would (and sometimes did) do the job for free.
Heavy automation definitely does away with jobs that people liked doing, but that's been true since the industrial revolution.
Most train drivers like driving trains, something like London's DLR doesn't have train drivers (a human _can_ drive the train, but when they take over it deliberately goes slowly for safety reasons, so this is not normally used in paying service). A five year old (or a twenty-something going on five years old) gets to sit at the front and pretend they're driving, which is fun for them but it's not a job any more.
Some people enjoy operating a simple mechanical loom. Some expensive cloths are still today "hand woven" with such a loom because the legal protection for the name of the cloth mandates that they be produced this way. Probably everything else you have that was woven is woven automatically by a machine because machines produce the same quality as a skilled weaver but in enormous volume and more quickly.
The question is never whether machines will displace people from jobs, but about whether new jobs will come into existence (in large numbers) to replace those jobs. It's not "Can a machine do my job?" so much as "Is there anything I could get paid to do that a machine couldn't do?".
People say automation will kill many jobs, but often forget that when that day comes, we'll also be much more empowered.
Now we can use neural nets and all sorts of mechatronics to create our own automation and bots. Software's free and hardware is cheap. What will so many people with so much free time on their hands, and with needs that are unfulfilled, do?
Imho that hardware part really depends on scale.
As nice as the thought might be, I doubt there are enough resources on Earth for a future where 8 billion people live a leisurely first world lifestyle in their smart homes with IT gadgets all around them, while robots take care of all the manual labor that needs to be done.
All that hardware requires resources and those resources are finite, at least on that little piece of rock we like to call Earth. As of right now that's pretty much the current ceiling for humanities progress and it ain't a very high one.
The comparison I like to use is horses. Horses used to be used for all sorts of things. When steam engines first started pumping water out of mines, they were given a "horse power" measurement of how many horses they could replace for the job, but they still couldn't replace horses for everything. It didn't take long for other, specialized machines to replace almost every other need for a horse. Now they are essentially novelties. You'll occasionally pay extra for a worse experience because it's fun and novel. The exact same will happen with human interaction. It's already started with "hand woven" and the like.
This has been my thought. There will probably be markets for businesses with "human staff". It's along the same lines as getting business for being environmentally friendly.
>"Is there anything I could get paid to do that a machine couldn't do?".
Work for free or even pay for the privilege of working. See some short distance truck drivers working 20 hours a day making losses on some weeks after paying for their truck lease and other costs that were externalised from the employer to the employee. You can't exploit a robot but you can exploit a human.
New jobs always come into existence. Everybody needs something to do with their day, and a job is just the work you do during the day.
The question is
(i) who is going to pay you to do your work during the day, and
(ii) will the rest of society accept that it is work of a type that fulfils the reciprocity requirement.
Without both of those the machines won't be ordered to produce anything by those who run and operate them.
We expect to receive something of value in return for the machine's output.
> The change that I continue to watch for is not when robots are used to do an undesirable job, but instead they are used to do a desirable one.
Like working in high-finance? A sector that's been overtaken by algorithms pretty much the earliest among all the industries.
Imho "the machines" have already "won", humans are mostly mere cogs in a whole collection of systems which see planet Earth as a gigantic perpetual "economic engine" in need of constant acceleration, or else it might come crashing down all around us.
The change that I continue to watch for is not when robots are used to do an undesirable job, but instead they are used to do a desirable one. I suspect the first hints of that are programs that write sports copy for newspapers. I have known a couple of sports writers over the years and they really liked what they did, and would (and sometimes did) do the job for free.