Everyone's panicking about the wrong jobs. Software engineers, copywriters, graphic designers - they're the ones sweating right now, and honestly they should be.

A $20/month subscription can do in seconds what took them hours. But the guy who cleans your office at night? The woman who works the knots out of your shoulders every Thursday? They're going to be fine.

The math is brutally simple and nobody's talking about it. A massage therapist costs maybe $40-80 an hour depending on where you live. Tesla's Optimus robot - their big bet on humanoid robotics - is projected to cost somewhere around $20,000-$30,000, and that's the optimistic number Elon throws out. Real-world pricing will probably be higher.

So you're looking at a machine that costs as much as a car, needs maintenance, needs charging, needs software updates, and still can't feel that your left trap is tighter than your right one. A cleaner costs you $15-25 an hour. For a robot to replace them, it would need to navigate stairs, move furniture, handle a hundred different surface types, figure out that the weird stain on the counter needs a different approach than the one on the carpet, and not break your grandmother's vase on the shelf. We're decades away from that level of physical dexterity and spatial reasoning being cheap enough to compete with a person who just... does it.

This is the part that tech people consistently get wrong. They think intelligence is the hard part because intelligence is what they value. But manipulation of physical objects in unstructured environments is an absurdly difficult engineering problem. Your brain does a million calculations just to fold a fitted sheet and you still mess it up half the time. Now imagine programming that.

The economics don't work in reverse either. AI software scales at near-zero marginal cost - one model serves a million users. Physical robots don't scale like that. Each one is atoms, not bits. Each one breaks. Each one needs to be physically present in a specific location. You can't download a robot to someone's house. Plumbers, electricians, house painters, landscapers, movers, home health aides - these jobs require cheap, adaptable, general-purpose hardware that can problem-solve on the fly.

That hardware already exists. It's called a person, and it costs about $15-30 an hour with no upfront capital expenditure. The irony is thick. We spent decades telling kids to skip trade school and learn to code. Now the coders are competing with software that writes software, and the plumber is booked out three weeks because nobody can replace what he does at a price that makes sense.

I'm not saying these jobs will never be automated. Eventually, maybe. But "eventually" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence. Physical work got undervalued for a generation. AI might be the thing that corrects that.