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Human Labor, AI and Robotics

Technological change for better or worse ?

The impact of AI and robotics on labor has been on my mind for years, and the issue I think is more relevant now than ever, pressing even, while it has been tempting to bucket AI under general technological change which is more or less understood, I believe this is somehow naive as AI is proving to be a different animal all together, or rather the promise of AI (AGI in particular) coupled with robotics seems like it could replace all labor, which sounds great as many people would rather not work, until you realize 99% of the world needs a job to survive, then what ?

How much does it cost to hire a human ?

About $10–$20 per day (~$2/hr ), keep in mind there’s a wide range of wage disparity and the bulk of human economical activity ( about 50% or 2 billion humans ! ) is done by unskilled workers on the lower end or below the average cost ( $5/day $0.60cts/hr for garment workers for instance).

Not long ago you needed to hire a skilled artist to make an illustration like the one above, this was done in about 5 minutes of iterations on Leonardo.ai and 10 minutes of fixing small mistakes, not perfect, but hope it drives the point, any skill level in theory can be automated.

So it would make sense from an economical perspective to replace human labor if the same work could be done for less.

How much would a…