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don't we already have lots of machines that do things like this though? Even if its human operated: excavators, combines, tractors, and other heavy machinery have reduced the physical burden involved in sustaining large societies tremendously.
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Yes there are fewer hands on the job site but there are still hands at all. This is increasingly becoming not the case in the future. The goal is to fully eliminate all hands and all minds. There will be no more sponges of newly available labor. Then what happens exactly no one really knows or even wants to meaningfully try to answer, because the implications are too disturbing.
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If you use a computer to do something, training an AI to use the computer to do the same thing just takes the computer, which was there anyway. (Yeah, plus training the model, that's not my point.) But if you do something physical, replacing you takes something physical to be there.

We may eventually manufacture the robots to do all these things. We aren't there yet.

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How long do you give it?
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I looked into this (or rather, had Google Deep Research do a 30-page report on it!) and it's still a very long way off. So long, that the AI, or any reference it found, would not even give me a rough timeline, but I suspect it is multiple decades away. The main blocker is a very severe crunch in the supply chain of critical materials, mostly rare earth elements which are essential to make those high power density + high precision motors feasibly.

Today we have a tiny fraction (like 2%?) of the global supply needed to make enough robots to replace all humans.

This is before we get to the other logistics like power and the rest of the materials, but we have a path to scale those up (except maybe Copper, that's another tough one.) Turns out rare earth elements are actually very abundant, but extremely hard to mine, very toxic to extract (which is partially why China has a strangehold on those) and we don't have a good path to scale those up.

All of this could be moot if we figure out alternative technologies for equally capable motors that could be manufactured at scale, but AFAIK whatever promising is on the horizon would still take a very long time to ramp up.

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That doesn't make intuitive sense to me.

First, you make a robot that mines rare earth metals. Then construction robots. Then an automated factory for assembling robots. The whole premise is that the robots are faster at these tasks than humans would be.

If the robotics are feasible their rise should be exponential, not linear, since each robot built makes building the next faster and helps to remove whatever bottleneck you had.

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Mining is not limited by human labor, we already use huge machines (and some robots) controlled by a few humans. The limitations are investment in huge machines and processing plants, and regulations on where/how you can mine/process.

You can't just have a robot start mining/processing rare earths, anywhere in the country. You need permits, and a lot of money. I guess that didn't stop AI companies ... but there isn't an "infinite" novelty/hype premium for rare-earths, like there is for LLMs.

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> If the robotics are feasible their rise should be exponential, not linear

That totally does not follow. Robots can be feasible and their payback curve can still be linear or sublinear.

Take mining rare earth metals, for instance. The problem with mining rare earths isn't that it takes so much human labor. The problem is doing it without poisoning the surrounding 30 square miles. Replacing the driver of the earth mover with a robot doesn't fix the chemistry at all, nor (I suspect) does it significantly affect the economics.

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We're waiting for the point that replacing the humans is the cheaper option. Not sure that robot plumbers are in our near future.
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What's your definition of "near future"? 3 months? 1 year? 5? 10? 50? 100?
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Not the other commenter, but we won’t have robot plumbers in 10 years. Maybe in 50.
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Robots have been used in industry for decades already. Most jobs won't be worth investing in the robot doing it, since human labour is cheaper than the capital investment.
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To the start of it? Maybe two years?

To the end of it? Maybe 40?

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I would agree with you, if we taxed the ever-living fuck out of AI companies to enable UBI, so that the people replaced with robots did not end up homeless.
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Well, first these AI companies would have to turn a profit.
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