Comment by RetroTechie

Too narrow view:

"Moving atoms" can refer to anything that a) touches the physical world, b) has 'eyes' (camera/microphone/Lidar/IR/UV/whatever) and c) requires some brains.

Dark factories exist. This will expand into other areas like logistics, farming, food delivery, maintenance/cleaning jobs, household equipment, etc etc. Over time, blue collar jobs face the same fate.

A lot of this will be powered by AI systems running locally on commodity hardware.

And this is where China is leading: They've got the factories. They build the robots. They make the ICs with integrated video capture & AI features. They fabricate the circuit boards those ICs go on. And they lead in the small/local AI models to run those.

To compete, US would need to re-shore manufacturing which takes decades. Same for EU countries (which have great potential imho if they weren't so slooooww to act & would focus on doing vs. regulate).

Never mind that the billions poured into AI by US companies, are targetting white collar/creative jobs, with the AI part as a cloud service. Or military applications. Not (so much) the manufacturing / logistics etc side of things.