As I write yet another Labor Day’s column, I am fascinated by the fact that the richest man in the world can become the first trillionaire if he is able to produce and sell a million Optimus humanoid robots, deploy a million Robotaxis for commercial use, sell 20 million cumulative vehicles, increase Tesla’s operating income to $400 billion, and increase its market capitalization from 1.1 to 8.5 trillion dollars.
That’s some pretty impressive labor. More importantly, if Musk succeeds there will be big ramifications for the U. S. labor market.
The Tesla Optimus robots are expected to cost around $20,000. Musk says this cost will drop significantly once mass production takes hold. The human hand has 27 degrees of freedom. The Optimus robot has 25 degrees of freedom with 25 forearm actuators and soft polymer tips with high-resolution tactile sensors.
The big problem with robots in the past has been programming their movements. But with generative robotic AI, the robots can learn on their own and share that learning with every other robot using a communal cloud robot brain.
Gemini AI predicts that in ten years, humanoid robots will be capable of performing between 20 and 50 percent of all manufacturing tasks with far less cost, whining, absenteeism, union threats and coffee breaks.
If these predictions seem incredible, remember that between 10 to 12 percent of all existing manufacturing tasks today are done with some type of robot.
We still have a long way to go. Currently there are 307 robots per 10,000 workers and 80 percent of factories have no robots at all.
So should we be celebrating or worried? I have friends in both camps. Personally, I think it would be great to live in a world where all physically demanding, repetitive work is done by machines. More time to play and enjoy.
Many people believe work is a key part of human existence. It gives us perseverance, strength, and character. There’s probably some truth in both perspectives.
I thank my lucky stars I didn’t spend a huge part of my life on a manufacturing assembly line. I just don’t think I could do it.
People have long feared labor-saving machinery will put them out of a job. The most famous historic episode involved the “Luddites.”
Here’s a short AI summary of the Luddite movement.
The Luddites were an early 19th-century social movement of British textile artisans active between 1811 and 1816. Facing the rapid expansion of the Industrial Revolution, skilled weavers and knitters saw their livelihoods threatened by mechanized looms and wide-frame knitting machines, which allowed factory owners to bypass trained craftsmen in favor of low-wage, unskilled labor.
Led by a mythical figure named "General Ned Ludd," the workers organized a clandestine campaign of direct action. They broke into factories at night to smash the new machinery, sent threatening letters to industrialists, and occasionally clashed violently with the military.
Crucially, the Luddites were not opposed to technology itself; rather, they protested the use of machinery to drive down wages, degrade working conditions, and bypass fair labor practices.
In response, the British government cracked down brutally. Parliament passed the Frame Breaking Act, making machine destruction a capital offense punishable by death. They deployed over 12,000 soldiers to northern England to suppress the uprisings and conducted mass trials. By 1817, through executions and forced exiles, the movement was crushed, leaving "Luddite" as a modern shorthand for anyone opposing technological progress.
I am not writing about this abstractly. I am a journalist. My whole life’s work has been dedicated to absorbing information and learning how to explain things simply for the average reader. That’s what journalism is.
Now AI large language models can ingest far more information than my human brain ever could. And the AI models can spit out commonsense explanations far faster than I can write.
It’s kind of weird being obsoleted at the end of my career. But that’s progress.
Nevertheless, I am optimistic, perhaps delusionally so. I can’t help myself.
I am reminded of the Merle Haggard song, Rainbow Stew, which I think is mainly tongue in cheek:
When they find out how to burn water
And the gasoline car is gone
When an airplane flies without any fuel
And the sunlight heats our home
But one of these days when the air clears up and the sun comes shinin' through
We'll all be drinkin' that free Bubble Up
And eatin' that rainbow stew
Eatin' rainbow stew in a silver spoon
Underneath that sky of blue
We'll all be drinkin' that free Bubble Up
And eatin' that rainbow stew
