AI's crosshairs are now locked onto blue-collar jobs.txt

(Summary at the bottom)

AI Translated Image

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?

AI Translated Image

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.

AI Translated Image

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.

AI Translated Image

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.

AI Translated Image

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.