Age of Humans: Will labour be back in demand?

Reading about all the news with the oil futures spike, peak oil theories and inflation makes me wonder if good old two hands will become more important in the future for a country.

Whenever I compare India (where I was born) and USA (where I live), I find that anything that requires human touch is a lot more expensive in the US than in India. The opposite is true for highly automated machines. Household help/caregiving, massages, drivers for hire, etc. are all less expensive to hire in India. Hiring people for cheap is usually the most common differentiator when people compare the quality of living in India with USA.

I even remember a speech at my college by the Human Resources Development minister (who is the ex-officio head of the IITs) highlighting this point. He was berating the computer science students for working on Robotics when we should be focusing on trying to better utilize India’s best resource – the abundance of human resource.

If automation (automobiles, manufacturing, et. al.) gets more expensive then in a hundred years we might be back to using human power to power everything! Not back to the dark ages, but to cycling and hammer and tongs…