Comment by sassymuffinz

I think the economic issue as you say isn't on physical labour it's on the fact that most of the jobs in the west are now in some sort of service industry or office work. Here in the UK we basically rely on the service industry to employ a large amount of the workforce. If MechaHitler Grok becomes sentient then that's a lot of middle-class earners out of a job and the economy goes with it.

You're absolutely right that an AGI isn't running a cable or digging a hole any time soon, but you're going to have 100 people trying to get their hands on the shovel to get paid for the digging - depressing the wages in those hands on jobs.