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I still think most white collar stuff will go first, but certainly with LLMs applied to robotics it’s clear now that blue collar labor won’t be far behind.
At some point, maybe, but why waste GPUs on manual labor, when naked monkeys can dig for cobalt for a mere 2-3K calories of Uncle Klaus' Bugs?
Yeah obviously in parts of the world where labor is $1 a day it’ll take much longer. But at the same time there could be a textiles effect (where indigenous textiles industries in Africa were totally destroyed by cheap donated clothing made in Bangladesh for the West) where they can get donated machines from Bill Gates or second hand stuff that lets them eliminate labor all the same.
Labor prices are perfectly able to adapt to the current market situation, so I don't see why the developed world should be exempt. It's also not about absolute prices, but about the relative marginal costs/profits of investing resources into building a manual labor performing robot vs. putting those same resources into expanding SkyNet.
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