Here is a video of a robot arm picking up an egg. With feedback from sensors in the grip, a robot could pick an orange easily. Putting the gripper on an arm, with a camera at the edge, could do the job pretty simply.
Now no robot today could do it cheaper than underpaid workers, true. There are jobs in factories in SE Asia that could be automated but aren’t because the workers are cheaper than the robots. But if labor becomes expensive due to restrictions on immigration, this might change in the US.
Recently read a novel by Todd McCaulty, The Robots of Gotham. Where many of the nations around the world had either elected AI to be their leaders or been overthrown by AI.
Why does it have to be *one *robot? And robots have had the uneven ground thing waxed for years now.
I don’t think you’re up to speed on current robot gripper tech. In addition to Voyager’s electro-adhesive example, there’s soft pneumatic tentacle grippers and my personal favourite, vacuum coffee ground balloon grippers
How long before hologram TV becomes a serious prospect 
?
The obvious area for expansion of IRL tasks, especially in economies with ageing populations, is personal/social care - not so much medical or paramedical nursing as domiciliary care, like lifting, toileting, and just checking that someone’s eating properly, entertained and not isolated.
There is only one correct answer to this: AI developer.
This is by definition: as long as there remain jobs that humans can be paid to do, there will be others who want to automate those jobs and thus collect what humans would otherwise be paid.
So they will pay AI developers to do it.(note that early AI developers will need to keep learning new skills or they will be unemployable)
By definition, once AI developers develop ai advanced enough to develop itself to automate all remaining jobs, they will in turn lose their jobs as well.
So it really is the last job.
Politicians and philosophers.
Morticians and models.
Bouncers and pole dancers.
I think a lot of people substitute a sense (accurate or not) that some things will not be able to be automated in the next 25 years, for “never happen”. But those are very different things. This country still operates on a constitution created 230 years ago, and our institutions have operated continuously since then. Every Supreme Court justice and every member of Congress serves with people who served with people who served with men who served with men who served with men who were part of those institutions 200 years ago. The buildings they work in have been there about the same amount of time. Are you really confident that 200 years from now, those “never” occupations will still be impossible to automate?
Or how about major religions like Islam and Christianity, that still operate out of playbooks written over a thousand years ago? Confident that 1,000 years from now, we won’t be able to automate virtually everything? These periods of time are not really so long.
As for the OP’s question, the kind of construction work involved in creating new buildings is already in the process of being automated. I do agree that handyman/fixit type stuff is much more difficult, but we may find that in the future it will be much cheaper to simply knock down a building and have a new one constructed in its place rather than repairing it. Or construction may be modular, and it will just involve a machine removing one section of a building and replacing it with a brand new module. At which point no one will know how to repair anything. We have already gone a significant way towards this state of affairs with electronics.
While legal work done in the office is on the cusp of being automated, I don’t believe people will accept robot lawyers or judges in courtrooms. So trial lawyers and politicians may be the last to go (other than people who work in boutique operations for rich people, doing a human version of a job that is otherwise mostly automated), which is kind of funny given how unpopular they are.
Religious officials. Food service workers. Roofers. Gardeners.
As we’ve discussed many times in the past, people often have the wrong idea about “automation”. They imagine that one day we invent a robot travel agent, and on that day human travel agents are obsolete.
But automation typically doesn’t work like that. We don’t usually replace humans with automation that does what the humans do, we replace it with a system that eliminates the need for as many humans. So we don’t have a robot with a scrub-brush washing the dishes, replacing the human scullery maid. Instead we have a washing machine, which washes the dishes in a completely different way than a human being would. But the dishwashing system still requires a human being to load the dishes and remove them. So rather than ten guys with scrubbers cleaning the dishes, you have one guy loading racks into the dishwashing system, and one guy unloading racks.
Or you have the replacement of the gas station attendant. The real change isn’t the gas pump, but the payment system, where you just get out and put in your card, and then the customer does the work that used to be done by an employee. Or we have the replacement for travel agents, which are direct web portals to online hotel and transportation bookings. But this requires a sophisticated customer who knows how to use it. My wife has to make all the bookings for her mother’s travel nowadays, because it’s too complicated for Nana to handle. That work that used to be done by an travel agency employee is pushed on to the consumer.
So automation isn’t going to replace doctors. It’s going to make doctors more efficient, which might mean we need fewer doctors. Or take prostitution. The real substitute for prostitution isn’t robot hookers, it’s internet porn. Maybe that’s not a one for one substitute, the substitute isn’t as good as the real thing. But if the ersatz substitute is cheap enough and convenient enough, most people will stop demanding the expensive and inconvenient “real thing”.
Those are good examples. It’s just I’ve been hearing about this sort of technology being developed for years, and it never seems to progress to the level where it’s viable on a mass production scale, which is what would be needed. I guess the whole point of technology is that it generally progresses, but it doesn’t always progress in the way we expect.
Oh, really? What porn have *you *been watching? :eek:
To the OP: computer programmers. What programmer is going to be dumb enough to write a computer program to replace him/her? Or at least I hope so, being that I am one!
People train robotic replacements for themselves all the time. And in this case, it’s likely to happen on a continuum of creating tools that allow a single programmer to work more quickly and do more so that they replace multiple others. Maybe we never get to a point of having no humans involved at all, but it eventually becomes a skeleton crew.
Maybe not. Considering the lifelike dolls now available, anatomically correct, with optional heaters and appropriate sound effects, sex may be not the last, but the first, to succumb to robotic temptation.
Or so I’ve heard. From a friend.
Doesn’t really matter. There will be people desperate enough to sell themselves for less than anyone would pay for a robot even if there were sex robots available on a per-hour basis. The only way sex robots would take over from human sex workers would be if the economic situation were so good that there were no desperate people willing to sell their bodies for a buck, and the social situation had changed so much that their buyers didn’t also get a kick out of using humans for sex that they would never get from paying for a machine to simulate it.
Let’s not forget the drug farmers/chemists/smugglers/dealers. Pretty sure that’s slated to be a growth industry as automation increases, come to think of it.