We talk about automation a lot here, and for what it's worth there ARE a lot of jobs that can currently be automated (factory assembly jobs, fast food, customer service etc) but when you work in trades (general construction, telecom, etc) it becomes clear that there are an astronomical number of jobs that cannot be automated with what we currently have. Jobs that involve so many different combinations and variations of tasks, that until we can successfully and cost-effectively map and reproduce a human brain, automation isn't a realistic goal. You would need to have machines that could critically think instead of just following a set of instructions on a firmware chip.
An example would be: tower climber. One minute you're crouched on all fours in an underground christy box, grouting around the edges of a entrance conduit. Next minute you're in the radio shelter, routing and wax-stringing DC power leads across a very crowded ladder rack and into a rectifier shelf, in an extremely confined space where bumping into one fiber card could take down the whole site and brushing against a 48v bus bar could blow your fingers off. Next minute you're throwing on a harness and climbing up a monopole, pelican hooking to climbing pegs as you go, with a block and rope carabinered to your waist that you need to adequately rig up and send back down the tower once you reach the top. Next minute you're hanging underneath an antenna array by your positioning lanyard, waiting for the ground guy to send up a grunt sack of various specific hardware that you need in order to build an (extremely creative) set of coax supports in a very tight area.
And that's sort of just scratching the surface - scratching the surface of what that specific job involves, and scratching the surface of how many other jobs are equally as detailed and varied.
You could create a grouting robot, a measurement-taking/wire-cutting/color coding/wax stringing robot, a spatially-aware climbing robot that analyzes key tie-off and rigging points as it goes and can relay a detailed list of hardware down to a logistics/capstan-operating robot on the ground, a robot that can look at a tangled spaghetti-mess of coax and determine which sectors and technologies the NOC robot needs to turn down in order to disconnect and reroute everything to meet carrier specs.
You could automate each of those tasks, as well as all other tasks related to the job that i'm too lazy to include, but then you'd have 25 specialized robots all trying to work in the same space, doing the work of a 2-3 person crew. One do-it-all, zero-margin-of-error telecom-construction robot would be an immensely resource-hungry machine and not something we could both miniaturize to the size of a person and produce cheaply. We're finally working out the kinks of creating robots that can teach themselves to walk and respond to basic questions. We've successfully digitized the brain of a nematode, it took us years to map out the behavior and firing patterns of the 286 neurons that make up its nervous system.
Anyway. Hope this made some sense. I know it sounds like I'm tooting my own horn but that's my take on automation. Skilled human labor won't be obsolete for a long time. Not an imminent threat.