That doesn't really sound like an argument against skilled labor to me. Somebody needs to maintain those machines. Someone needs to set them up, plug them in, calibrate them, feed them raw materials, and generally keep them working.
As technology changes, the skills you need in order to rightly be called a "skilled" laborer change. In general, they seem to tend to require more education over time (although this might just be social; I'm not convinced that it really requires more study to become a programmer today than it did to become a good paleolithic hunter, it just seems easier to us because their training wasn't formalized and thus seems invisible). You can't expect one skillset to just carry you safely through the rest of your life without staying on top of changes.
Machines eliminate some jobs, but they inevitably create new ones: designing, maintaining, and operating the machines. In many cases they eliminate more jobs than they create, which is something we need to plan for, but I don't see any real chance that the machines are just going to make human beings obsolete -- in any avenue of work -- tomorrow.
As far as maintenance of telerobots, in the extreme case it's performed by other telerobots, manned by call centers full of "certified" gamers 10 or 10,000 miles away. Maybe not even call centers. Maybe employees are just perpetually on call, forced to "goggle in" periodically throughout the day to snake a drain in Brisbane or Bangladesh or Boise. In fact, they were probably goggled in already, playing U(niverse)oS(tarcraft) XXII, so they just alt-tab over.
Sounds crazy, I know, but it does seem to follow the general historical trend of alleviating manual labor from those of lower and lower socioeconomic status, while neatly sidestepping the problem of Strong AI with an ass-ton of artificial artificial intelligence.
The romantic, manly labor the article talks about requires the direct manipulation of physical reality with one's hands. The above scenario is skilled, certainly, but by no means manual.
As technology changes, the skills you need in order to rightly be called a "skilled" laborer change. In general, they seem to tend to require more education over time (although this might just be social; I'm not convinced that it really requires more study to become a programmer today than it did to become a good paleolithic hunter, it just seems easier to us because their training wasn't formalized and thus seems invisible). You can't expect one skillset to just carry you safely through the rest of your life without staying on top of changes.
Machines eliminate some jobs, but they inevitably create new ones: designing, maintaining, and operating the machines. In many cases they eliminate more jobs than they create, which is something we need to plan for, but I don't see any real chance that the machines are just going to make human beings obsolete -- in any avenue of work -- tomorrow.