“Emerging startup Physical Intelligence has no interest in building robots. Instead, the team has something better in mind: powering the hardware with the continuously learning generalist ‘brains’ of AI software, so existing machines will be able to autonomously carry out a growing amount of tasks that require precise movements and dexterity – including housework.”
From New Atlas.
“Thailand is setting a regional precedent this month by giving refugees permission to work in the country in an effort to tackle aid cuts and its own labour shortages.
More than 87,000 refugees living in nine refugee camps along Thailand’s border with Myanmar have been totally reliant on handouts of food and foreign aid.
Many of them have not left the camps of makeshift shelters in the four decades since, as ethnic minorities in Myanmar, they were driven out by a violent military regime.
But now shrinking foreign aid budgets, especially from the US, which had supported the refugee camps, and a border dispute with Cambodia, has pushed Thailand to reconsider its approach.”
From The Guardian.
“A historic EU-style free movement agreement comes into force in four Caribbean countries on Wednesday, in a deal which officials hope will stem the flow of skilled professionals leaving the region for North America and Europe.
The agreement between Barbados, Belize, Dominica and St Vincent and the Grenadines (SVG) follows decades of discussions and negotiations among members of the Caribbean Community (Caricom) – a regional grouping of 15 member countries.
The ‘full free movement’ will allow nationals of the four countries to reside, work and remain indefinitely in any of the countries without the need for a work or residency permit.”
From The Guardian.
“Mothers are using AI as a personal assistant to manage the invisible work of raising today’s kids…
ChatGPT’s gender gap appears to be closing. Immediately following its release, only 17.6% of active ChatGPT users had typically feminine first names. As of June 2025 the percentage of active users with feminine first names had jumped to 52.4%…
By the numbers: ‘Organizing my life’ was the second-most popular use case for genAI in 2025, according to new research from Harvard Business Review…
What they’re saying: ‘ChatGPT has basically become like an extended village of my parenting,’ Sandy Shakoor, a PR director with two young kids, told Axios.
‘Now there are three of us to do things,’ Sarah Dooley, founder of AI-Empowered Mom and mother of three, told Axios. ‘AI is the third supporter, the third leg of the stool in this little household.’ Dooley used to teach mothers how to use AI in classes she held in her living room. Now she hosts a podcast, writes a newsletter and is developing an AI assistant, all in the service of reducing the mental load of motherhood.”
From Axios.
Blog Post | Labor & Employment
Summary: Work has changed dramatically over time, shifting significantly from physical to mental labor. Today, office jobs demand far less physical energy and carry far lower risks of injury or death compared to physically demanding trades. This transition shows how progress has allowed us to create more value with less strain on our bodies—and with far greater safety than workers of the past could have imagined.
Economist George Gilder points out that using blue-collar hourly wage rates to calculate time prices underestimates the gains we’re enjoying in an economy that’s no longer driven by muscle but by mind. Knowledge workers earn more in an hour, consume fewer calories, and risk far less death or injury than other workers. In other words, they do far more with far less. This is the true compounding of progress—and we can see it mapped on a single chart.
Calories Per Hour of Work
I asked several AI models about the number of calories per hour that different kinds of work require and this is what I got:
The energy demands of physical work versus knowledge work reveals a dramatic difference in caloric expenditure. Workers in physically demanding jobs burn significantly more calories than do their office counterparts:
High-energy physical work:
Moderate physical work:
Office work:
As we transition from working with atoms to working with knowledge our bodies require a lot less energy to perform that work. Moving from construction work to sitting at a desk in an office requires 77.8 percent fewer calories per hour. Put another way, the calories needed to fuel one construction worker can power 4.5 office workers. The result is an economic system that creates more value with less resource consumption.
Fatal work injury rate
The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports on fatalities on the job:
Farming, fishing, and forestry are the most dangerous professions at 24.4 fatal injuries, with transportation and material moving at 13.6, and construction and extraction at 12.9. Office and administrative support are the least risky professions at 0.6. Farmers, fishermen, and loggers are more than 40 times likely than an office worker to be killed on the job. Moving from construction work to sitting at a desk in an office reduces the risk of a work fatality by 95.3 percent. Adjusted for population size, construction workers experience a work-related fatality rate more than 21 times higher than that of office workers.
And it was much worse in the past—something that we tend to forget when looking at present statistics. In 1900, deaths in the mining and oil extractions fields (lumped under mining) was estimated at 333 per 100,000 workers and remained that high through the 1920s. We can hardly comprehend just how good we’ve got it now.
Calorie-fatality index
If we combine these two factors into a calorie-fatality index and compare the construction and office industries, we note that office work is 99 percent lower than construction work on the index. Moving from blue-collar construction work to an office job indicates an overall improvement factor of 96.75 (or 9,575 percent) on the calorie-fatality index.
Find more of Gale’s work at his Substack, Gale Winds.
