blue collar labor

Allegedly, they are close to having human-equivalent robots, maybe 5-10 more years tops. Manual labor won't be safe either once that happens.

I'm still skeptical about the capabilities of the AI. They still can't do tasks that aren't in their training data.

What they're doing is firing lots of workers, and having humans "review" the AI work. But if your workload is 5x-10x and you're reviewing AI work, all you can actually do is rubberstamp the AI output. There isn't time to carefully review everything. But, the human reviewer is still there to take the blame when the AI fails. They call this "accountability sink".

In software at many places, all the code is written by AI. Some places even forbid "manual coding". The AI will generate many more lines of code than a human would for the same task. A lot of the code looks good, but has subtle errors when merged. The remaining software engineers are spending all day reviewing AI slop instead of writing code. You also have a lot more volume of code, because everyone is now fixing tickets at 2x-5x the rate before. A lot of them are getting disgusted, because reviewing AI output is boring after awhile and frustrating because the AI code is good enough but with subtle flaws.

Firing half the workers and doubling everyone's workload also means salaries will crash. If you don't want to review AI slop all day, there's someone who was just fired who's desperate for a job.

This might be a ticking time bomb, where businesses have code that is 100% AI written. The humans are screwed the first time there's a bug the AI can't fix. With enough technical debt, the AI eventually starts introducing new bug regressions every time it fixes something.