Manual labor and trades is likely to be one of the last things to go, so the whole "dropout of school and go into trades" crowd may have been more correct than ever, though their original reasoning was not.
Yes, this is likely true. Plumber & Electrician on existing construction will likely take a long time (relatively speaking) to automate. And even if we end up being able to do it, it could be that humans will be the cheapest option when it comes to a lot of manual jobs especially given that there will be a large supply of unemployed humans in many scenarios.
Especially if the timeline is 40 years (as opposed to, say... 4.) I have no doubt AI-assisted robotics development would have solved the plumber and electrician jobs in a decade or two.
But I’m not sure it will take 40 years. I’m quite sure Astra could figure it out, it’s just too slow and robots are too weak. The speed will improve, and robots may lag shortly thereafter but by not much. I give it 1-2 years for AI, and 5-10 years for robots tops (perhaps even quicker).
It's also quite likely that the next big era for humanity will be the space era. And that stands to create the biggest labor boom in human history. It could also happen far faster than many might expect, even moreso as there will be competition between countries, especially as those left with only terrestrial claims will see their influence relatively wane. Space jobs and industry can also, in some ways, act as a more productive Works Progress Administration [1] to compensate for any temporary economic instability that LLMs might bring along.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Works_Progress_Administration
Why are meta glasses such a big deal? Because they need training data for manual labor.
Realistically the outcome of highly capable advanced AI is an economic dark age more than anything else.
And jobs that require humans’ responsibility.
People can do people stuff, machines can do machine stuff. And market will react accordingly.
Robots automating everything and humans not needing to work was the stuff paradise fantasies were made of.
Sure, it would be the end of capitalism (which, I guess you could describe as "economic dark age"), but people these days have so little imagination what life outside of capitalism looks like that ideal societies sound like a horror story.
Communism was a horror for multiple reasons, but two big ones were: the planners didn't have the data or ability to actually plan (the interactions in a market economy did that much better), and not doing the work you were assigned was a crime (that is, slavery).
AGI and AGLabor solves both these problems. If you don't need workers, you don't need to coerce them into work. And planning and massive data collection (and management in general) sounds like something AGI would work very well at. The conceit that the lower classes are disempowered before the capitalists never struck me as well founded.
If it's you and me, then hey, we can all live happily ever after pursuing hobbies and art, provided for by our mechanical friends, within the limits of resource availability.
If it's an AI trillionaire, things aren't so rosy. If they don't need workers, why would they even bother allocating outputs from the robots to keep us alive?
I don't doubt at all that some group or another will enjoy the fruits of artificial labour. The question is how we are going to get there, and whether that group is most people who are live today and their descendants, or just the families and friends of trillionaires.
I guess one could make the argument that with enough control, a trillionaire could amass a private robot army. But I think regular humans still win (after an epic battle of course).
Meta glasses are a terrible example for the case you're making a point about: 90+% of whatever video they'll capture will be trash data.
It'd be much more efficient to set up dedicated sites just for producing the very same training data you're claiming they harvest.