[Teever]

I think that we're going to approach it from the top and bottom.

The second we have humanoid robots that can do maintenance on themselves as well as operate their assembly lines and assembly lines in general will be a massive shift.

I think the baseline for that will be a humanoid robot that has the price tag of a luxury car and that can load/unload the dishwasher as well as load/unload the washing machine/dryer and fold and put away clothes. That will be total boomer-bait for people who want to 'age in place' and long term care homes in general.

Once we have that we can focus on self-replication on the micro-scale. There is tremendous prior art in the form of ribosomes and cells in general. A single cell hundreds of millions of years ago was able to completely reshape the entire face of the earth and create every single organism that has come and gone on the Earth. From fungi to great whales to giraffes, jellyfish, flying squirrels, and sequoia trees the incredible variety of proteins in a myriad of configurations that life has produced is remarkable.

If we can harness that sort of self replication to make power our economy it will make the idea of bootstrapping the economy on this world and others much easier.