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Robots are expensive, software is not. I can instantly duplicate software 1 million times and run it in parallel, I can't just produce 1 million robots. Physical world is always harder.

Even if we get robots who can, say, build roads start to end, there is still a HUGE gap between that and it actually being used. There is a hard floor, too. Robots are made of physical things, physical things have scarcity, and there's no way around that to our knowledge. Even if you can build the robot for 1 cent, the material cost will still exist.



> Robots are expensive

People are not, though, and all the folks who are no longer necessary in knowledge work are available for physical work.


Dark thoughts... Imagine a future where most human beings are just overseered by an LLM and we are just wearing AR work glasses. Barely aware of what (physical) work we are doing as we overlay our hands within the projections of our AR glasses. Every task is decomposed into a set of small physical steps, you don't even think about what you are trying to actually accomplish, just follow the steps one at a time. I wonder if an entire fast food restaurant could be run in this fashion? No managers, no shift supervisors, just a skeleton crew doing one step of a task at a time.


Why have fast food restaurants at all at that point? Just have everyone eat the same mass-produced, nutritionally-optimized substance, and use the AR vision to superimpose pretty pictures over that food. Varied meals are for the rich.




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