Well said, agree completely.
I respect your profession (whatever it may be), but I definitely don't respect your opinion that advances in auto-manufacturing will come to some mysterious halt. Corps and unis are investing incredible amounts of dough and brainpower into it, and measured by publications, this isn't wasted money.
I respect that. I really do. On a practical level I don't hold a candle to your in your area of expertise. I do know one thing, though, and I know it very well: that every process in the physical world can be reduced to algorithms if all the necessary parameters and variables are sufficiently operationalized and quantified. Every imaginable process. CNC lathes don't even strike me as especially hard, it's your biped walking example that usually gets singled out as one of the holy grails.
Come on now. You can't be serious. Or are you a terminally-ill cancer patient? Just kidding, but seriously, the rate of progress in theoretical robotics and expert systems is staggering. I concede, though, that the trickle-down into actual business practice is uneven and depends on a lot of factors (legal situation, unions etc.).
What exactly is "laughable"? The work by Siemens on autonomous traffic guidance systems and self-organizing transport fleets is a very real project. There a quite a few players in that arena, I'm just singling them out because they have an testing area near close to where I live.
Perhaps as an ideal, but human-assisted expert systems already do, at this very moment, what they are designed to do: reducing the number of humans in the loop. Not only in manufacturing, but in many white-collar jobs as well (law, medicine, middle-management etc.)
Not NEET, but a theoretician. I freely accept your superior knowledge in specific manufacturing domains (and want to apologize for my insulting choice of words); I absolutely and 100% stand by my words, though, regarding one of the robotic axioms: every process in the material world can be automatized if sufficiently operationalized and parameterized. Everyone, without exception.
You really need to be specific about who exactly you mean by "our society".
Possible? Yes. Probable? Not so much.
It all depends on who develops and owns them for what ends. Robots don't exist in some social vacuum, they are embedded in very specific economic and power relationships.
Also: don't talk so glibly about the luddites. It took 2-3 generations during the 2nd and 3rd phase of the industrial revolution until some sort of capital/labor equilibrium was reached again, not to speak of WW1 which burned away much of the superfluous males of that era. The luddite fears were very justified, don't fall for the glib hand-waving of quasi-Jewish economists.