Comic Strips

Everything can be automated, just with lower quality, speed, and a high up front and ongoing cost.

But for a large segment of jobs, no one cares about quality. Speed can be increased by increasing the number of parallel automatons, thus cost. If you really want to get rid of all work, raise the minimum wage to $100/hour for one year. Don't tell anyone that it will only be a year. By the end of the year, almost every job will be automated.

Amusingly, cook is probably the safest of those positions for the time being. The physicality and necessity of presence makes it harder to automate. Lawyer, doctor, and teacher can be done remotely, and is based largely on knowledge, so they are prime targets. People are already trying it. Drivers you could see being done remotely if we had faster, more ubiquitous, net connections, so it's doable as well. It's basically already happening. But cooking... AI doesn't seem like it would give you the right kind of inputs and outputs to do that any easier/faster/cheaper. It's already possible to make a food vending machine. The limitations of vending machines aren't really that they need an easier interface on their database. AI won't really help there. And to go beyond that and try to make an AI powered restaurant probably wouldn't be profitable. It's barely profitable to run a regular restaurant most of the time. If you try to put in the probable millions to automate a restaurant, it'd probably go the same way as the self-checkout lanes at stores, which is to say poorly.

Drivers were on the edge for a long time. Lawyers are on the edge for the past 2-3 years. Cooks are probably the closest ones to be on the edge too.