[dragonwriter]

> 10+ years ago I expected we would get AI that would impact blue collar work long before AI that impacted white collar work.

We did.

Like, to the point that the AI that radically impacted blue collar work isn't even part of what is considered “AI” any more.

[mikeyouse]

I think it's Benedict Evans who frequently posts about 'blue collar' AI work not looking like humanoid robots but instead Amazon fulfillment centers keeping track of millions of individual items or tomato picking robots with MV cameras only keeping the ripe ones as it picks at absurd rates.

There are endless corners of the physical world right now where it's not worth automating a task if you need to assign an engineer and develop a software competency as a manufacturing or retail company, but would absolutely be worth it if you had a generalizable model that you could point-and-shoot at them.

[noduerme]

Or a generalized model to develop them in a virtual sandbox before deploying them physically, which I think is more likely.

[don_esteban]

I think the bottleneck for this is still the cost of the physical hw of the robot, and its maintenance.

You need a fairly robust one that needs little maintenance, with a multitude of good sensors and precise actuators to be even remotely useful for sufficiently wide range of tasks (so that you have economy of scales). None of that comes cheap.