We don't get the same current X productivity with 1/100th the people. We get 100x productivity, controlled by a few people / megacorps, until they lose control of it too.
You don't even need robotics, just a good multi-modal reasoner model with domain knowledge that you can attach to a headset manna-style [0]. The only thing that makes blue collar work different from any minimum wage labor is the System 2 reasoning required, and that'll get solved.
Why do you think they will never be replaced by robots?
But I will say that until we have a robot that can fold laundry, we won't have a robot that can go into your crawlspace and replace a chunk of crusty old galvanized pipe with copper or pex.
Robots have excelled, so far, in controlled environments. Dealing with the chaos of plumbing in a building that has been "improved" by different people over the course of a century is the opposite of that.
The other thing is that the salary of the plumber or welder is in the range $20/hr to $40/hr. Can you make a general purpose, agile robot function at a total cost of ownership that's substantially lower than this?
Thank Crom I'm old. But I'm worried for my kids.
Look, technology has always replaced jobs, throughout history (how many of you know professional lamp lighters, elevator doormen, or switchboard operators?) But the thing is, tech has always replaced the jobs that are easiest to automate ... not the "intellectual work".
I would be far more worried about being a real estate agent, food preparer, or heck, even a lawyer (for some specialties at least). I think they're all at more risk than programmers.
Unless work is a thing of the past by then, and we were the last generation of suckers who lived under the reality where 40hrs/week was just the way life is.
I don't see it as "replacing programmers" but rather, trying to solve the types of problems that programmers solve, but more cheaply.
I'm not sure your age relative to mine, but I got my start a hair breath after 9-11 in the defense industry. I've experienced the "tectonic" shifts in programming since that time. In each case, Programmers seemed to shift away from the work that was being done more cheaply, to work that require more specialization that was harder to be done.
I see the promise of AI as a threat to my job, but the reality is likely more like what happened with automobiles vs horses. Less horse shoe makers, more car mechanics.
Some day, I may be too tired and too dumb to become a mechanic. But today is not that day.
LLMs are great for tasks where small mistakes don't matter, and useless for ones where they do. Generating a 10,000-line Rails app where 10 of those lines are wrong is not very useful.
The same goes for all the AI agents, it will change how we work but will not make programmers obsolete. I'm more worried about 3 million engineering grads per year from India replacing me than CoPilot/CursorAI
Governments need to be talking about this like yesterday, and very few are from what I'm seeing.
AI companies and others using AI are going to profit from this massively, at the expense of many more. We need a better tax system to redistribute these profits across society as a whole.
The issue is capitalism but AI exploding is going to exacerbate wealth inequality like nothing else.