I wouldn't want to argue that truck driving and any number of other predominantly physical occupations are being changed by tech. But some people, from Gingrich to H/N, get so carried away by immateriality that they overlook how much physical labor goes on. I think it reflects the tendency of intellectuals - even Marxists - to overlook manual labor and see only the mental part.
Doug
^^^^^^ CB: Ye olde antagonism between workers of the hand and workers of the head ! Sometimes I wonder if one of the reasons Marx emphasized philosophical materialism in opposition to idealism was to counter the tendencies of his fellow intellectuals to give greater importance to their own labor which is predominanly mental labor over predominantly physical/manual labor. We predominantly mental laborers need the discipline of materialism. Perhaps predominantly physical laborers need more idealist philosophical discipline. We need more practice. They need more contemplation.
Need them for what ? For to make the rev, of course.
Of course, part of the suggestion here is that a greater "proportion" of predominantly physical labor is becoming mental labor, as machines take up more and more of what took toil and drudgery in the past.
With respect to this, it becomes more and more important to emphasize the core definition of the proletariat as their status as wage-laborers, who don't own means of production ( including intellectual property), rather than the characteristic of predominantly physical laborers. Computer programmers who are paid wages are proletarians. See Carrol's emphasis on defining classes based on relationship to the means of production.