If AI takes over white collar work that's still half of the world's labor needs untouched. There are some promising early demos of robotics plus AI. I also saw some promising demos of robotics 10 and 20 years that didn't reach mass adoption. I'd like to believe that by the time I reach old age the robots will be fully qualified replacements for plumbers and home health aides. Nothing I've seen so far makes me think that's especially likely.
I'd love more progress on tasks in the physical world, though. There are only a few paths for countries to deal with a growing ratio of old retired people to young workers:
1) Prioritize the young people at the expense of the old by e.g. cutting old age benefits (not especially likely since older voters have greater numbers and higher participation rates in elections)
2) Prioritize the old people at the expense of the young by raising the demands placed on young people (either directly as labor, e.g. nurses and aides, or indirectly through higher taxation)
3) Rapidly increase the population of young people through high fertility or immigration (the historically favored path, but eventually turns back into case 1 or 2 with an even larger numerical burden of older people)
4) Increase the health span of older people, so that they are more capable of independent self-care (a good idea, but difficult to achieve at scale, since most effective approaches require behavioral changes)
5) Decouple goods and services from labor, so that old people with diminished capabilities can get everything they need without forcing young people to labor for them
> If AI takes over white collar work that's still half of the world's labor needs untouched.
I am continually baffled that people here throw this argument out and can't imagine the second-order effects. If white collar work is automated by AGI, all the RnD to solve robotics beyond imagination will happen in a flash. The top AI labs, the people smartest enough to make this technology, all are focusing on automating AGI Researchers and from there follows everything, obviously.
+1, the second and third order effects aren't trivial.
We're already seeing escape velocity in world modeling (see Google Veo2 and the latest Genesis LLM-based physics modeling framework).
The hardware for humanoid robots is 95% of the way there, the gap is control logic and intelligence, which is rapidly being closed.
Combine Veo2 world model, Genesis control planning, o3-style reasoning, and you're pretty much there with blue collar work automation.
We're only a few turns (<12 months) away from an existence proof of a humanoid robot that can watch a Youtube video and then replicate the task in a novel environment. May take longer than that to productionize.
It's really hard to think and project forward on an exponential. We've been on an exponential technology curve since the discovery of fire (at least). The 2nd order has kicked up over the last few years.
Not a rational approach to look back at robotics 2000-2022 and project that pace forwards. There's more happening every month than in decades past.
I hope that you're both right. In 2004-2007 I saw self driving vehicles make lightning progress from the weak showing of the 2004 DARPA Grand Challenge to the impressive 2005 Grand Challenge winners and the even more impressive performance in the 2007 Urban Challenge. At the time I thought that full self driving vehicles would have a major commercial impact within 5 years. I expected truck and taxi drivers to be obsolete jobs in 10 years. 17 years after the Urban Challenge there are still millions of truck driver jobs in America and only Waymo seems to have a credible alternative to taxi drivers (even then, only in a small number of cities).
I'd love more progress on tasks in the physical world, though. There are only a few paths for countries to deal with a growing ratio of old retired people to young workers:
1) Prioritize the young people at the expense of the old by e.g. cutting old age benefits (not especially likely since older voters have greater numbers and higher participation rates in elections)
2) Prioritize the old people at the expense of the young by raising the demands placed on young people (either directly as labor, e.g. nurses and aides, or indirectly through higher taxation)
3) Rapidly increase the population of young people through high fertility or immigration (the historically favored path, but eventually turns back into case 1 or 2 with an even larger numerical burden of older people)
4) Increase the health span of older people, so that they are more capable of independent self-care (a good idea, but difficult to achieve at scale, since most effective approaches require behavioral changes)
5) Decouple goods and services from labor, so that old people with diminished capabilities can get everything they need without forcing young people to labor for them