[arghwhat]

The point wasn't really that workers should be the primary clientele, just that the average worker should be able to afford it, and if that wasn't the case the price of the goods should be lowered, or a trend started for higher worker compensation.

Robotic workers lower operational costs and can make goods more accessible, and it's common for various manual labour jobs to be lost when industries change - the labour shifts elsewhere, and generally higher.

(If this wasn't true, unemployment would have constantly grown worldwide since the first automaton replaced a human job or government outlawed certain manual industries, which isn't the case. Workforces do and must adapt to needs and trends.)

[allturtles]

I think the point is that once robots can do everything human bodies do and AIs can do everything human minds do, there is nowhere left for humans to go. Just like horses didn't find new employment when internal combustion engines reached the point where they could do everything a horse does but better and cheaper.

[arghwhat]

I think the horses were pretty okay with not being bred into slavery.

But there's a very, very big difference between "automate dumb task with unimpressive efficiency that beats humans because humans have to pee, eat and sleep", and AI supplanting humans in society.

Robots isn't an important step in that path tbh. Intelligence is, and we still aren't close, even when throwing entire hyperscale datacenters at the problem...

[exe34]

Poor people will go the way of the horse.