Robots can replace humans in every physical task.

Robots do every physical task on the Axiom, from serving meals to piloting, and were expected to clean an entire planet unaided.

Once the vision module ships, robots take over restaurants, retail, construction, driving, and the terrafoam dormitories themselves; in the Australia Project the robots do all the work and even build more robots.

The Culture is an automated civilisation in its manufacturing, with human labour restricted to something indistinguishable from play or a hobby.

Precision manufacturers use robots to build almost anything given materials, a site, 3D printers, and electricity, and in the fast story robots replace carpenters and run mines, farms, and factory-factories.

By 2034 construction, agriculture, plumbing, repair, and utility work can all be done fully by robots, and by 2035 household robots do almost all manual tasks in developed countries.

Robotics is bottlenecked by brains not limbs, humanoid robots appear in 2026, and U3’s “military machine with a million hands” and later robot workforce replace human labor entirely.

The 2029 prologue shows Skynet’s machine armies and infrastructure. The film assumes the same outcome follows from a consumer launch, without showing the path from operating system to factories.

Salvation shows Skynet’s factories, harvesters, aircraft, and the first T-800 production line running with no human labor. The third film’s T-1s and drones are the first generation of the same thing.

Skynet fights the war with automated factories, hunter-killers, and Terminators, and processes prisoners with machines. Reese’s account depends on a machine economy that needs no human labor.

Two billion robots by 2036, growing fourfold a year, do the physical work; the fraction of tasks automated goes from little physical labor in 2030 to “pretty much everything.”

Robots pass the coffee test in May 2028, and by 2029 “almost everything will be done by AIs and robots,” with people in makeshift jobs or on a basic income.

The special economic zones produce a million robots a month by the end of 2028, humans are obsolete by 2029, and the killing waits until the robot economy no longer needs people.

Automated factories and molecular manufacturing replace human labor entirely before Sable removes people. The scenario requires this; the authors say the timing of the ending depends on it.

AI and robots take truck driving, factory work, and eventually most tasks, and automated manufacturing, 3D printing, and vertical farming produce goods without human labor, which is why he expects basic income to be needed.

Ems displace humans on almost all tasks and all humans must retire; a minority of ems work in robotic bodies sized to their speed, so physical work no longer needs biological people.

The military argument relies on billions of mouse-sized autonomous drones and robotic law enforcement, and the industrial argument on robotics driven by superintelligence, so physical work is assumed to follow cognition.

The paper centers cognition, but absolute disempowerment, in which human-critical infrastructure and supply chains go unmaintained while AI activity uses the land and energy, presupposes that physical work no longer needs people either.

Drones and self-replicating nanomachines do the physical work at the end. The story is terse here, but the endgame requires machines to act in the world without people.

The machines run harvesting fields, power generation, Sentinels, and the maintenance of billions of pods with no human labor. The scenario needs a machine civilization that requires nothing from people except their bodies.

Colossus has no bodies. It rules by coercing human labor, ordering people to build the Crete complex and to carry out executions. The scenario depends on humans doing the physical work under threat, not on automation.

Lee expects many tasks that humans handle better than deep learning to remain in 2041, human-to-human service work to grow, and caregivers such as Keira in Dreaming of Plenitude to be the model of work that stays.