Captain Midnight's responses are certainly within reason, and I appreciate the thought that went into it. It should be noted that I tried to keep things from being "Too alarmist" yet not be too optimistic either. As a student of history, I am only too aware of the conditions that are attendent upon massive changes in "efficiencies" in any given industry or sector of services upon which people earn their income. The problem here is this:
As technology advances, certain specialized tasks become available that did not exist before. Some of these specializations (individual jobs in normal discussion!) require training, and some require merely that someone learn a specific set of not too difficult skills and carry on performing the job. Before, you had horse breeders, farmers growing hay, and blacksmiths in order to service the transporation technology in the distant past. With the invention of gasoline and rubber and metal working in a factory standard manner, we got cars. Gone were the Ferriers and blacksmiths and hay production centers. In its place we discovered the need for specialists such as car mechanics, chemists to produce tires, factory workers for cars and the like. This worked more or less fine because we still retains "unskilled" labor tasks/specializations as well had new specialties open up with varying degrees of training required.
The problem is however, that each of those specialties were filled/held by consumer/producers. In order to consume, they had to produce. The less society values what indivdiuals produce, the less worth society as a whole attaches to their work, which means either that those specialists earn less income, and are able to consume less, or they have to work longer to amass more money in order to consume what the other more "average" consumers consume.
Robotics on the other hand, does two things at the same time. It removes the availability of unskilled labor classification from many jobs. It also does not consume. If it did consume at a level equal to that of a sophant consumer, it would not be efficient to replace sophants with robots. While robots can require goods to maintain them, the factory owner would look at his balance sheet and ask himself "which costs more, the robot plus its maintenance costs, or the sophant and his wage costs?" If the factory owner discovers that it costs the same in labor versus maintenance costs of the robot, the factory owner may still buy robots. Why? If the robot can produce three times as much production goods as the sophant can for the same amount of money, then the factory owner knows that he just decreased his unit labor cost by 1/3rd. If the factory owner can sell the excess production, then he has made a HUGE profit. Problem is - in a one market environment, the factory owner is dependent upon having "consumers" to sell to. Consumers can only exist if they have an income - which is what they will lose if they are displaced by robots. Where the factory owner makes good however, is when he discovers he is not limited to just his market at home, but can sell his goods on worlds as far away as 10 parsecs. Is this viable? It can be. Suppose you have a widget that costs $200 credits to purchase, of which half the cost is labor costs. (I'm going to keep this simple rather than factor in profits, etc which in turn raise the price of items). The owner of the factory sells it on his home world for $200 and everyone is more or less happy. The consumer is happy because they can buy it. The factory workers are happy because they earned income while making the item. The factory owner is happy, because he has an asset he can sell. Now, lets say that the market can only absorb 100 units a day, and the factory can make 150 units per day. The factory owner either has to cut back production to 100 units or he will go bankrupt holding all those unsold units. But he decides instead, to sell them abroad. If the owner can fit in 100 units per 1dton of shipping packages, the owner of the units can ship 100 units at a price equal to 10 credits per unit (100 units times 10 credits per unit = 1,000 credits, the standard shipping cost per parsec). Selling his units two parsecs away at 220 credits isn't all that bad of a deal no? If that secondary market can absorb 200 units per day, the factory owner is in heaven. Now, lets take it the other way. The factory owner decides to buy enough robots to cut his labor costs by 50%. He's laid off a fair number of his workers, and they can't find a job. Not now, not ever - they were all IQ 4 people whose training consisted of boozing-1, whoring-1, G-ball appreciation-5, and couchpotatoism-4. I forgot the drug use and/or gambling, but you get the picture

In any event, the factory owner discovers to his dismay, that because his whole world is economizing with robots, that instead of being able to sell 100 units per day on this world, he can only sell 20 units per day on this world. As fate would have it, he can sell his units for 150 credits per unit, and ship it 2 parsecs away for 170 credits per unit. This is cheaper than what it costs to make on a non-robotic world, and edges out competition there. Since the market can absorb 200 units per day, that absorbs ALL of his production, and the factory owner is still one happy dude. He's unaffected by the unemployment issues on his home world, and he's still making the same level of profit as he did before - or, if he didn't drop his prices much, he's making MORE profits.
Those unemployed individuals? In order to ever have a hope of getting factory jobs, their wage costs have to drop below that of the robotic costs.
Mind you, I'm using "Factory jobs" as our current day analogs, as opposed to saying "unskilled labor" or "relatively unskilled labor". Robots who can handle unskilled labor can do so because the job requires almost little or no skills to do the job. A computer program that can replace a skilled practioner of a job that normally required mathematical abilities has just removed that job from the job pool. A computer that can spot weld machines has just removed that job from the job pool. Each subsquent job removed from the job pool - without a corresponding "unskilled or repetative job or relatively unskilled" category means that those who are at best, suited for unskilled positions, will be forever doomed to being shoved aside by machines that eventually can replace them.
If you're optimistic that computers will never reduce all of the unskilled positions from laborers, then that works out fine. If you believe however, that sooner or later, there will come a point where there is nothing a sophant can do manually that a robot can't do - then all unskilled manual labor will become best filled by robots. Those who can't handle being robot operators/mechanics or can't find jobs in sectors that service robots - are all going to have to hope that those books they write, those songs they create, those pictures they create using the latest artistic tools - will bring them in a lot of money. There are only so many service jobs available in the service sector that can be filled with unskilled labor. Imagine if you will having a roboburger joint that proclaims "Roboburgers, where not one germ dares land on the burger during the process between when we take your order to when your order is packaged and deposited in your hands in our highly automated food production system". Not a single living sophant exists within Roboburger because robots can move the burger patties from the freezer to the conveyor belt. Machines can discern via voice recognition what was ordered. Preprogrammed machines monitor the burger's progress through the conveyor belt as it gets sterilized, then cooked, then placed on pre-prepared bun, then wrapped, and set into the bin that will be delivered to the customer. Oh, I forgot. Someone's got to fill the robo joint with the food and take out the garbage right? Oops, they have cleaning robots to do that chore. They have delivery trucks (Possibly robot piloted) with a robotic system for offloading what was required. The position of "maintenance man" for the robojoint might require some menial training - maybe.
As was stated - it all depends upon the degree by which robots are permitted to take over jobs. Maybe by custom, service sector jobs are culturally the domain of living sophants. Maybe the custom is such that each robot laborer is taxed by a specific amount. The more robots you use instead of sophants, the more the tax is - sort of like a sin tax for the benefit of those you no longer employ. Maybe the world is heavily roboticized and all factories are owned by the government, who in turn use the proceeds to subsidize the unemployed? This is TRAVELLER - where anything that can be imagined might actually work
