Comment by coldtea
5 days ago
Physical jobs will drop in demand and increase in supply too. Unemployed "mind" workers don't have much to spend to drive much demand in manual work, and they might even try to pivot themselves to manual work, making things worse for manual workers.
and those who did the "mind jobs" 30-40 years ago retain that wealth, while wages plummet and they don't have to give up any significant part of their wealth to get what they want. This destroys class mobility , creating a type of feudalism.
“Physical jobs will drop in demand too”
Why?
Because we have a largely paper pushing service economy and so the guy who's plumbing a luxury condo is dependent upon the existence of some overpaid javascript monkey who the builder/financiers are counting on to buy the condo when it's done.
If you automate the paper pushing what happens? Jeff Bezos isn't gonna buy more condos.
but one of his execs will buy and raze the whole block and build himself a luxury compound?
It seems unlikely "physical AI" will be a complete bust but the post you're replying to is positing that fewer people will have money to spend on their services.
A lot of well-paid physical labor is going to face more competition from DiY + AI guidance among able-bodied and cost sensitive adults.
Even 1.5 years ago I replaced a blower motor in my vehicle with something like Sonnet 3.8 as the driver - saving myself $400 in labor and having a fun and educational experience to boot. Many home repair items fall into categories like this, where the actual physical skill demands are fairly low, but skills + background knowledge + supplies-on-hand were the value driver.
The BG knowledge is now available to anyone for free, and it comes with its own knowledgeable shopper.
Thx - that’s a valid point
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