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Notes -
The tricky part is that some mundane work and some intellectual work is easy to automate, but in many cases it's hard to tell ahead of time just how hard it will be. You can predict trucking and data entry will die off, but what will it take to crack cooking or construction or hairdressing?
And the white-collar work will be equally scattershot at approximately the same time. "It's all on the computer so it should be easy to capture inputs and outputs right?" is the kind of assumption that makes a million AI researchers' foreheads hit the desk. We'll certainly get there eventually but in this case the specifics matter.
If all the grunt work went first, we could hope for a smooth transition to post-scarcity. Sorry, we automated away your job scrubbing toilets, but on the upside production is so cheap that you can survive off your 19 twitch subs as a league of legends vtuber. But if the robot revolution happens in patches more or less randomly, then there are people with real social power that they stand to lose, and that implies chaos.
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Separately, new tech is always a gimmick, until it's not (though I agree most gimmicks are not new tech). I wouldn't have trusted Atlas to run a parkour course, until it did. Who's to say Boston Robotics will stop short of cleaning bathrooms? It seems unlikely there will be a fundamental limit in the tech that prevents that.
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