As someone who works an unskilled labor job in logistics, I fully expect the "AI" rollout for physical labor stuff to be disastrous. I've already seen their attempted replacement of front-end labor (i.e cashiers) be a horrible failure that customers hate, doesn't work properly, yet the corp still tries to force as a thing, because it's an industry mandate.

Ironically AI DOES replace a lot of makework white collar jobs fairly well. It wouldn't surprise me if it ends up displacing more professionals than blue collar workers--but since those professionals have all the pull with politicians and upper crust, they might end up banning it and saving their jobs, whereas coal miners were told to fuck themselves. We already see the beginnings of this with the political moves to "regulate" AI.

Looking far into the future, it actually seems more reasonable to me that we'd have AI overlords managing everything while human labor does everything cheaply, than the reverse. It turns out that the human capabilities when it comes to physical labor are hard to replicate, robots often fuck shit up and cause lots of damage. Imagine a robot trying to do fine detail work of organizing a shelf without knocking down $10,000 worth of merchandise.

The Matrix in reality probably wouldn't be humans hooked up as batteries; it'd be humans serving as slave labor. From an efficiency perspective, the least efficient part of society is the upper crust. The lower rung has already been mercilessly squeezed to be as efficient as possible, with the profits from that efficiency going to the lazy upper rungs of society. If you were an AI looking at the whole of society, what you'd be looking to "trim" as inefficient would be the office workers, upper management, politicians, etc.