It will not start to replace a lot of blue collar work simply due to how much cheaper is will be to have a human pulling levers on a tractor than making specialized guidance software

For the AI we have now, you’re right. A human is cheaper and more versatile.

I don’t know how close we are to AGI but when we get that, the math will change. Theoretically, all it takes to teach a “general intelligence” to do a job is the same effort or less that it takes to teach a human.

That means if you have a humanoid robot of the kind that already exist today you can get it to do any job by showing it how to do it, like how you’d show a new employee. Now the question is if the cost of the robot plus electricity over the life of the robot is less than the cost of a person.

Let’s say you pay a human $40k to work on a farm, running a tractor and so on. Maybe the robot costs $100k. Electricity for the whole year is certainly under $5k. So three years with the human costs $120k. Three years with the robot costs $115k.

Four years with the human costs $160k. Four years with the robot costs $120k

We’re all in trouble here. I’m not sure what the solution is. I feel certain the elites are doing this math too and dreaming of a day when both the farm worker and the farm owner/manager are AI and they no longer have to put up with us lowly serfs.