[Dalewyn]

>while it being replaced by robots may be better for society as a whole (if one follows the belief that all work should be done by machines so that humans can follow their individual interests)

While "robots" are a fairly recent concept, the advancement of human civilization has been predicated on ever increasing efficiencies of human labor.

[mschuster91]

> While "robots" are a fairly recent concept, the advancement of human civilization has been predicated on ever increasing efficiencies of human labor.

Agreed. But in general, the efficiency gains got redistributed to the people - usually, by (bloody) revolutions and strikes.

Across the Western world, we haven't seen any meaningful progress in that redistribution in a fucking century - the 40 hour work week got introduced around 1926 [1]. Instead, all we got was that women now get exploited by employment providers as well, so the pool of available labor power virtually doubled, driving down wages while over the last few decades housing costs exploded and the demand for labor went down, further driving down wages. It remains open if the rise of pacifism and "non-violent action" in general that has happened in parallel in the same timeframe was coincidence, causation or consequence.

We are in for a wild ride over the next years. Luigi will not be the last one of his kind, I think this was just the start...

[1] https://www.cultureamp.com/blog/40-hour-work-week

[jedberg]

The problem is, since the beginning of time, all the improvements were in mechanical work, allowing humans to shift towards more intellectual work.

Now the "robots" are replacing intellectual work, and humans have no where to go.

[viraptor]

Is that really the case? So far all the examples I've seen were closer to "change X caused people to shift to another type of job, or to a new area opened up by X". Very recently some creative work has been impacted by LLMs, but apart from that, are there real stats on the intellectual work being taken over?