I agree that building an interactive model of the supply chain's labor intensity, and how it has evolved over time would be really impactful piece of work. A few resources that I would take a look at:
Hello everyone! Occasional lurker, first time poster here (working in government tech ops, writer in my free time). I learned a lot from this forum when I wrote an exploratory piece about 6 key AI variables to watch last October.
Since then, I've taken a deeper dive into how quickly occupations typically change each decade (going all the way back to 1870!) to get a better sense of what a reasonable timescale for AI-driven automation of labor looks like. There was an interesting debate between Ajeya Cotra and Jason Crawford a few weeks ago about whether this would take years or decades.
I take Jason's position on this (decades), but that still leaves me... (read 312 more words →)
The idea of human-level skilled labor being completely free is an alluring one, but one that may never be completely true so long as humans maintain agency (likely in my optimistic worldview).
Even if production processes were completely automated, making value judgements about the usefulness of the outputs was useful and where to go next is something that humans will probably want to continue to maintain some level of control over where material resource costs and timeliness still matter (i.e. feedback loops as you mention). The work involved in this decision-making process could be more than many people assume.
A good example of this is how Google claims that 30% of their code is... (read more)