Wait what kind of blue collar professions are likely to be disrupted by AI?
At least the negatively impacted ones that is.
It has already been happening for decades. For example pick and place. There have been systems doing this using computer vision for quite a long time already. They can tell a product's color or shape and sort it into separate bins. These often use neural networks to operate. You can expect increasing use of artificial intelligence for quality control of products as time passes.
You have robots for vacuum cleaning. Another menial task which can now be vastly simplified with pretty simple artificial intelligence.
A massive one that could happen if they get it working properly it automated vehicle driving. Try checking out how many people are employed as drivers in the transportation sector. The number is just huge. You already see robots moving objects inside factory and warehouse facilities which previously would have been done by people driving with forklifts or carrying boxes as it is.
I'm assuming that advances in automation and other machinery that can do low-skilled or no-skill labor will replace the need for the human element, but for things that require more complex knowledge/skill how can AI replace them?
With regard to talk I often hear that artificial intelligence will replace programmers well that is bullshit. The moment that happens we just won't need humans for doing anything useful anymore. It might automate some programming tasks, but programming tools, and automation of programming tasks isn't anything new. Programmers have been doing it basically since the beginning. The creation of assembler language, higher level languages, code generation tools, are all mechanization to vastly increase worker programmer productivity.
The largest destruction of jobs caused by artificial intelligence over the next decade other than maybe replacing bus and truck drivers is automation of clerical worker tasks i.e. white collar jobs. Just think of how good machine translation and speech recognition is today. This massively reduced the amount of paid translator jobs. Medical exams is another area. Analysis of the medical exam results is highly automated today. I am also hearing that a lot of paralegal positions in law are also being eliminated. For each high paying job there used to be lots of lower paying jobs in the white collar sector where people just did a rough preprocessing of documents. All of this is currently being automated.
It is going to be really fun when people will realize that because all the entry level jobs are gone, there is no way to cheaply train the higher level jobs anymore. To a degree this has already happened in blue collar jobs like welding and might also happen to white collar jobs.
