Its not just the manual labor jobs under threat, a lot of legal/accounting/engineering types of jobs are also being replaced for the more repetitive types of tasks. I was recently reading online about a successful divorce system somewhere in Europe, although for the more complex cases they still use real people to mediate, most of it was automated. In the legal profession, most of the searches are being automated also. In engineering there are programs that do the modelling and more.
I also remember reading about research being done on music, to see how it affects mood etc, with the aim of automating song writing.
I was recently at a funeral, was talking to someone who works in mental health, and they were complaining about the lack of freedom in assessment methods decision making, they told me if you dont follow a step by step procedure you get fired and get replaced by someone who will do what they are told, so even psychological support jobs are becoming automated, though they still have a real person as a contact point.
Met one of my old school friends, downtown, a few months ago, he is joiner/cabinetmaker, where he works, all they do now is draw a design in a computer, and hire other people to monitor the machines, its all cut by robots so it just basically slots together like an IKEA product. He was going nuts with boredom, but is not qualified to do anything else, and is now stuck on a low wage working long hours to pay for house and children.
I go to see the doctor, they ask me what the symptoms are, then key them in, the database then spits out some questions, they ask them, or do there observations, and the computer comes back with the diagnosis/recommendations for treatment. I leave the doctors room wondering why I could not have done this over the internet, and saved myself a 1 hour wait in the waiting room etc.
I go to the chemist (drugstore in american speak), take in a prescription (doctors drug order) for medication, they enter it into the computer, a robot the size of a small bedroom processes it, prints a label, sticks a label with persons name and directions onto the required drug box, and it drops it out like airport snack vending machine. There is no part of that process that requires a pharmacist attendant other than to refill the machine and pass me the end product. I really do not know why the doctor does not email the request to a distribution center for either pickup or to be mailed to my home address.
Geez, even contacting most large companies by phone to either pay a bill to make an inquiry takes you through 15 minutes of automated questions, and a further option of completing a automated satisfaction survey at the end. Its actually quite difficult to get to speak a person at some Institutions, and others impossible.
Automation is changing the world, doing what computers did to typewriters and draftsmen in the 90's, and there are very few jobs that are anywhere near safe. That includes most of the thinking type ones, the only real brake on progress is peoples fear of machines, ie, wanting a real person to talk too.
As for people not looking or wanting work, I just finished watching the local news here, and were two main relevant issues to this article, problems with increasing numbers of homeless people in the city of Melbourne's streets and a survey showing more and more people are having to travel up to 4 hours to get to work, as where the jobs are the housing is so expensive that they cannot afford to buy in or rent. Melbourne is supposedly one of the most liveable cities in the world if you believe Wikipedia and the agency that rate that sort of thing.
As someone else mentioned earlier, people are becoming sheep, and last time I checked, sheep are not getting paid to think!