You make some good points, but I really don't think you can compare what is happening now to the change in the late 1800s ~ early 1900s. That change resulted largely in people moving from manual/menial labor on farms, to different kinds of manual/menial labor in factories. There was no truly significant complexity shift.

Now we are looking at a major complexity shift. Machines are starting to fully replace, or greatly diminish the need for human workers in low to medium complexity roles: call centers, drivers, house-cleaning, weapons of war and law enforcement, etc. - even medical diagnostics and your plumbers and electricians.

Check out the new house cleaning robot from Berkeley. There is no reason to think that it will not be able to learn to be a decent plumber or electrician in a few more years.

Sophisticated professional roles - doctors, some lawyers, some engineers, researchers, politicians... - will remain for a good while, but this misses the real point.

No matter how generous you are, the reality is that there are a lot of people who will not be capable of filling one of the remaining roles this time around. We will have to decide, as a society, how to handle that. I hope that means minimum income, but it could also mean a pretty nasty police state. Either way it is going to be a tectonic shift; the jobs will disappear, and my guess is that our generation will have to cope with that.

I think you are also wrong when you suggest:

If it requires ANY creative thought, a person is better.

It does not matter whether a person is better, only that the machine is cheaper and good enough.