Plaid

The popular depiction of AI in popular culture is almost always based on some hardware, it's always a machine, more often than not humanoid. But that obviously comes later, the robotics aspect of AI will not come first, the first AIs will be software services, basically. They will deal in information.

It's not blue collar jobs that will be the easiest to automate, it's the service and administrative jobs. No need to build hardware for most of this, it's IT infrastructure for the most part. The hardware for the rest is already available in people's hands, literally.

The information jobs will be far easier to automate than the manual labor. It's not the janitors who will go first, it's the accountants and other jobs that deal in information.

Then again it will mostly shift software development jobs from having less to do with chasing obscure bugs and more with what's actually important: their usefulness to people, their design and function.

It will be awesome in opening development to so many more people, but people are sleeping on upscaling old games and how awesome it will be. It's realistic that this can run in real-time and so will be highly customizable.

Just imagine playing games like Chrono Trigger or the first Metroid but they look as good or better than the best anime out there or Into the Spiderverse. So many well-crafted experiences that aren't worth playing for most right now, they can be made to look photorealistic or with personal artistic styles, but just generally look beautiful and crisp like modern graphics.

Same with old movies, even sports. Lots of sports classics locked away because it looks like it runs on a bad potato. So much potential to look for the best footage of sports legends and have UHD of the best of their career. Too laborious by hand, but for a machine it's trivial once the various parts can be hooked together. As long as it's digitized, it can be rebuilt. We have the technology. Well, soon.

It can even go wilder, like old movies reimagined. Just a bit or a lot. Like what would Gone with the wind look like if Tarantino directed it? Or lightly update the graphics and styles to something more modern in terms of cinematic style and camera work. Or replace an actor. That one will be a teensy bit controversial.

Lots of potential for people to do remakes of series or movies. Like remove an entire plotline from this series, and this character dies in season 2 instead of continuing. It's the same series, just that one mistake is entirely gone. Or reworked, the timeline presented in a way that makes more sense. Or remove all the filler episodes. Instant remix from a simple instruction. Unlimited potential.

If somehow there is some multiverse out there that can give access to unlimited alternative copies of this world, it would be more worlds than FTL would ever allow. The point of exploring other worlds is to have more and if it's easy to move between them, even large cargo, that beats any spacefaring logistics. Infinite worlds, even if in the same place in spacetime, pretty much accomplishes the best of what FTL is about. Aside from meeting powerful and friendly alien civilizations, which has the risk of meeting powerful and very unfriendly alien civilizations.

So it would be better in terms of real estate and safety, pretty much remove all threats if we can simply move to safe dimensions if anything universe-ending happens, and solve the Fermi paradox. If it's better to have infinite worlds in the same place, no need to slog around in slow spacetime, everyone sticks at their infinite homes.

The holy grail of finding planets is always Earth-like planets and surely copies of Earth are the best you can have, especially if infinite. That would be better than FTL in most aspects. Other than the possibility of hot alien sex, which has the possibility of horrible alien sex.