[casey2]

You're describing valueless automation. We can build an assembly line and mass produce cars, that only has value if society is restructured. The food delivery industry only moves a trillion (globally) because it's incredibly wasteful, not due to value. Most of the value in going to a restaurant was in the experience and culture, the food is just a blend of fats, carbs and protein, but you pay more for the "luxury" of eating in your house or at work.

You'll have cities made to serve cars and food made to serve delivery and worker drones. In the pursuit of optimization you'll end up back at the same place, when there was only one cafeteria in walking distance.

Anyway we aren't "on the brink of full automation" that's ridiculous, people always think this, because they have no idea how brittle automated systems are. To get a generally intelligent robot that operates in the real world you have to go WAY beyond replacing knowledge workers. The brain only uses 1W more when it's working at full tilt, 5% more. For any physical job the body is using. The full body at rest uses 100W, walking that's 300W, manual labor 600W a full sprint could peak at 2000W. That's an absurd range made only possible due to trillions of cells packed with ATP and billions of microscopic capillaries full of glucose that get sucked into your muscles the second you use them. Automation only works in closed systems, give it 2000 years maybe someone makes AGSI, then the robotics problem becomes approachable, but if it were smart it'd just declare it impossible without biotech.

[ghoblin]

Energy is just one component of cost per unit of work, and in most modern economies it's a very small one. Industry has always traded energy efficiency for productivity. Excavators burn huge amounts of fuel compared to humans with shovels, data centers consume megawatts compared to the brain's ~20W, and forklifts are nowhere near biologically efficient. They still win because the economic cost per unit of work is lower.

In the case of AI the key difference is how the systems scale. Human labor scales linearly: if you want 10x more output, you hire 10x more workers, and the cost scales roughly the same. A human brain might run on ~20W, but each worker is still €20–€50+ per hour and can only do one task at a time. AI systems scale more like software infrastructure. Once the model and servers exist, the marginal cost of additional tasks is mostly compute and electricity. A data center might burn far more energy than a human brain per task, but it can handle thousands or millions of tasks in parallel and run 24/7. The cost per task can end up being cents even if the system is much less energy efficient "per brain".

Labor is expensive because you're not just paying for the task. You're paying for the worker's entire life infrastructure. Wages have to cover housing, food, healthcare, transportation, retirement, taxes, etc.., So the price of labor largely reflects the cost of sustaining a human being in society, not just the marginal cost of performing the work