If AI continues to improve at the current rate for 40 years then there is unlikely to be such a thing as a career.

Manual labor and trades is likely to be one of the last things to go, so the whole "dropout of school and go into trades" crowd may have been more correct than ever, though their original reasoning was not.

> Manual labor and trades is likely to be one of the last things to go

Yes, this is likely true. Plumber & Electrician on existing construction will likely take a long time (relatively speaking) to automate. And even if we end up being able to do it, it could be that humans will be the cheapest option when it comes to a lot of manual jobs especially given that there will be a large supply of unemployed humans in many scenarios.

Lots of people are seeing a future where LLMs will 'knock out' many things that we currently take for value, but not considering our reactions to that. It's akin to how many economists, most famously Keynes, thought increases in productivity (less than we've long since achieved) would lead humanity to a point where we'd eventually only be working for fulfillment and routine, perhaps 15 hours a week. LLMs are going to bring the value of most digital cognitive work to something approaching $0. But all that's going to do is open up a huge vacuum in the economy for other things to become more valued, and for things to then be built on top of the now universally available near-free cognitive work.

So the obvious things that will probably increase in value will be stuff done/created in the real world, and creative work. We're also likely on the cusp of humanity having a much greater presence in the cosmos which will likely create the biggest labor boom in human history. I think the time-scale could also be far sooner than some might anticipate. We went from glorified markov chains to 'gg cognitive jobs' in a very brief period of time.

Something similar could happen in space going from 'neat we landed on Mars' to YOLO Galactic Imperia Humania, even if the earliest motivations may be as banal as 'We need to get to Europa [1] before China!' This is even more probable given the ability to defacto use this as a modern Works Progress Administration. [2] The countries left on Earth are going to see their influence shrink rapidly relative to countries that begin establishing meaningful grips on bodies outside of Earth.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Europa_(moon)

[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Works_Progress_Administration

Don't you think a robot can fix your toilet as well?

Why are meta glasses such a big deal? Because they need training data for manual labor.

Better to train on our own adaptability, which to an extend includes an advanced understanding of personal mental health

If it crashes, there will still be trades jobs but they won't pay enough to eat. What can you charge for electrical work when everyone is either broke or an electrician?