Yet it keeps not having happened just yet.
EDIT: I'm talking about all human work, not just physical labor. The "manual labor" part of the quote confuses my intended point.
That's incredibly facile. Were there solid state digital electronics at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution? Was there machine learning? Motion control? Systems engineering? A robotics industry?
Just aping the "power source of the future" line from the fusion joke and pretending it's the trenchant result of long experience is the tactic of a 15-year-old.
As far as I can tell the only special thing about automation in today's world is that the jobs being created are more often being created abroad than they are in the US (e.g. the million or so people employed by Foxconn in China) and predictions of automation destroying jobs are very blatantly being used politically as a way to draw flak away from job destroying trade agreements and austerian measures.
Now, the remark is about actual inexpensive robotics in the context of what seems to be a genuine AI and computer vision and control renaissance, funded by government and corporations. Those are all just different remarks. To package them all up as one "thing that people have been saying" does a real disservice to the discussion. And it's a pose.
In the current case, I find it difficult to say whether the remark will turn out to be naive. However, any competent discussion of whether or not it is has to rely on an assessment of the current situation of computer vision, AI, control theory, economics, and law.
And it's exactly the same right now.
Any competent discussion also needs to take into the account the various special interests who want it to be believed that AI is taking over irrespective of whether that is the truth or not... and why they want that.
It also needs to take into account the various crass errors in many of the economics papers on this topic - including basing the probability of automation on how "creative" an economist considers a job (Oxford) or creating economic measures which make no mathematical distinction between a Chinese factory worker and a robot (Ball State University).
The fact of the matter is, however, that we (humans) do a lot of different things, so we need a multitude of specialized machines and automation. That takes time, and we had to pick and choose where we started. Farming is one of those that is ahead of the curve, fast food is mid-way as it is just now becoming cost-effective. Health care, not so much right now. Those are more difficult machines.
For clarity, what I more refer to is kitchens without human intervention save for mechanics. The machines make burgers, fries, and whatnot. It seems the first wave is going more to replace the cashier, though: McDonalds has introduced touch-screen ordering stations and grocery stores have self-checkouts.
https://www.nuffield.ox.ac.uk/users/Allen/unpublished/econin...
Yet it keeps not having happened yet.
What do you think about Wilson's 14 Points, by the way?