Adapting to Jeopardy-Playing Robots

This post by Kevin Drum interests me, and intersects with something I've been thinking about for a while. Basically, my idea comes from the following observations:

1) There are a large number of people doing unskilled or semi-skilled jobs;

2) Many or most of those jobs are of a sort that could easily be done by a robot instead;

3) Capitalism being what it is and robots being cheap, it is not at all unlikely that many of those jobs will be done by robots in the medium-term future;

4) Most of those jobs are quite unpleasant and/or unfulfulling jobs to have, relatively speaking.

Observations 1-3 are the bad part of the robot revolution, the part that Kevin Drum says could lead to robot riots. But it strikes me that Observation 4 means there ought to be some potential upside in all of this. If society needs fewer actual human beings to be doing boring, unhealthy, and sometimes dangerous factory work, then fewer people will need to do that work. In and of itself, that's a good thing. The problem comes from the fact that if nothing else changed, those people would have no job instead of a lousy job, and would therefore live a life of poverty and hardship, which is not cool. But there ought to be ways to take the promise of robots doing our dirty work for us and make it actually into a good thing. I think one of the keys is education: if all of the people displaced by robots were given access to genuinely good higher education, then they could become "skilled workers"/people who could have more satisfying jobs. We could devote more of society's resources to things like education (teaching, after all, is often a highly fulfilling job), intellectual pursuits, the arts, entertainment, etc. But only if society realizes that this robot revolution is coming and that, far from fearing it, we need to work to get positive value out of it.

The other key, I think, is a stronger social safety net. Things like entertainment jobs, though obviously amazingly lucrative if they pan out, often don't. And there's no guarantee that society would always need as much in the way of labor if robots were doing most of the manual labor necessary to keep society operating at its most basic level. Indeed, I've sometimes seen in this potential mechanization of most low-level labor a back-door path to something almost resembling the world Karl Marx wished to see: if we get to a world that doesn't need very much human labor for its basic functioning, perhaps we could eventually decide to come up with some way of letting people have decent lives even if they aren't doing labor. I'm not sure exactly how it would work, but I think it's the kind of thing that's worth considering in the coming several decades.