> elimination of all human labor.

Manual labor would still be there. Hardware is way harder than software, AGI seems easier to realize than mass worldwide automation of minute tasks that currently require human hands.

AGI would force back knowledge workers to factories.

If AGI/ASI can figure out self-replicating nano-machines, they only need to build one.

My view is AGI will dramatically reduce cost of R&D in general, then developing humanoid robot will be an easy task - since it's all AI systems who will be doing the development.

A very cynic approach is why spend time and capital on robot R&D when you already have a world filled with self-replicating humanoids and you can feed them whatever information you want through the social networks you control to make them do what you want with a smile.

Fortunately no government or CEO is that cynical.

As long as we have a free market, nobody gets to say, “No, you shouldn’t have robots freeing you from work.”

Individual people will decide what they want to build, with whatever tools they have. If AI tools become powerful enough that one-person companies can build serious products, I bet there will be thousands of those companies taking a swing at the “next big thing” like humanoid robots. It’s a matter of time those problems all get solved.

Individual people have to have access to those AGIs to put them to use (which will likely be controlled first by large companies) and need food to feed themselves (so they'll have to do whatever work they can at whatever price possible in a market where knowledge and intellect is not in demand).

I'd like to believe personal freedoms are preserved in a world with AGI and that a good part of the population will benefit from it, but recent history has been about concentrating power in the hands of the few, and the few getting AGI will free them from having to play nice with knowledge workers.

Though I guess maybe at some points robots might be cheaper than humans without worker rights, which would warrant investment even when thinking cynically.

I'd order ∞ paperclips, first thing.

Sure thing, here's your neural VR interface and extremely high fidelity artificial world with as many paperclips as you want. It even has a hyperbolic space mode if you think there are too few paperclips in your field of view.

Pump Six and The Machine Stops are the two stories you should read. They are short, to the point and more importantly, far more plausible.

... and eventually the humankind goes extinct due to mass obesity

With an AI workforce you can eliminate the need for a human workforce and share the wealth or you can eliminate the human workforce and not share.

AI services are widely available, and humans have agency. If my boss can outsource everything to AI and run a one-person company, soon everyone will be running their own one-person companies to compete. If OpenAI refuses to sell me AI, I’ll turn to Anthropic, DeepSeek, etc.

AI is raising individual capability to a level that once required a full team. I believe it’s fundamentally a democratizing force rather than monopolizing. Everybody will try and get the most value out of AI, nobody holds the power to decide whether to share or not.

The danger point is when there is abundance for a limited number of people, but not yet enough for everyone.

Past industrial and other productivity jumps have had their fruits distributed unevenly. Why will this be different?

Most technology is a magnifier.

Yes, number-wise the wealth gap between the top and median is bigger than ever, but the actual quality-of-life difference has never been smaller — Elon and I probably both use an iPhone, wear similar T-shirts, mostly eat the same kind of food, get our information & entertainment from Google/ChatGPT/Youtube/X.

I fully expect the distribution to be even more extreme in an ultra-productive AI future, yet nonetheless, the bottom 50% would have their every need met in the same manner that Elon has his. If you ever want anything or have something more ambitious in mind, say, start a company to build something no one’s thought of — you’d just call a robot to do it. And because the robots are themselves developed and maintained by an all-robot company, it costs nobody anything to provide this AGI robot service to everyone.

A Google-like information query would have been unimaginably costly to execute a hundred years ago, and here we are, it’s totally free because running Google is so automated. Rich people don't even get a better Google just because they are willing to pay - everybody gets the best stuff when the best stuff costs 0 anyway.