(Summary at the bottom)

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The explosive growth of AI over the past few years, especially LLMs and Generative AI, has triggered an unprecedented sense of crisis among white-collar workers. The fear that intellectual labor—coding, journalism, design—could be automated is being backed up by actual data. On the other hand, the prevailing wisdom was that blue-collar jobs like plumbing, electrical work, welding, and construction were relatively safe because they require physical interaction in unstructured environments. But are blue-collar jobs really safe?

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1. AI researchers worldwide are now sprinting toward robots that can replace blue-collar labor. LLMs have matured to a level where they're already replacing countless white-collar pros. Now, academia and researchers are hunting for a new challenge: Physical AI and robotics.

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Google DeepMind's RT-2 (Robotic Transformer 2), revealed last year, was the opening shot for blue-collar replacement. It showed massive leaps in reasoning, generalization, and performance.

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2. Robots have now mastered complex hand-eye coordination. Projects like Stanford's Mobile ALOHA have pushed the success rate of delicate dual-arm manipulation to over 90%.

3. Robots have mastered complex movement. Models like the Unitree G1 mimic human motion perfectly.

4. Robots are now cheaper than the average blue-collar salary. The G1 model costs around 22 million KRW ($16k), which is cheaper than minimum wage. The ROI is less than a year.

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5. Mass production of robots to replace blue-collar workers has already begun. Companies like Agibot and Tesla are building large-scale production systems.

6. Some factories (BMW, Xiaomi, etc.) have already started swapping human workers for humanoids.

7. Outlook & Summary: The threat to blue-collar jobs is real. The extinction of jobs and a total structural overhaul driven by robots has begun.