No, long term we somehow get something magical like LLMs that swoop in and magically pull off these tasks.

None of that. We get LLM on the jobsite and it tells worker how it’s done.

Often nothing as cheap as humans in terms of energy consumption. I doubt LLMs will beat that energy consumption.

Humans are .. complicated. You cannot just compensate a human’s caloric expense (although many companies would love that).

Anywhere a human gets involved shit gets expensive. Interestingly robots are pretty human-intensive, from design to programming and maintenance. Only at scale does the “human factor” go down and things become affordable.

Also, humans are squishy, you need safety requirements to keep them intact (seeing as human repair is incredibly costly and takes ages to complete, often with no guarantee that repair completes and performance levels go back to nominal), humans need sleep and can't work around the clock, and they have a mind of their own, which can make them difficult to deal with.

Indeed. Most of them are also bad planners and lose track of priorities very, very easily. Besides that, there is non-stop internal strife and quarreling as they are deeply social creatures that need to be in constant competition with one and other in order to be happy. You need another class of humans to "manage" these issues.

Once those two layers interact, you get a whole new dimension of problems you get to deal with. The creation of yet another layer of "management" is inevitable. It's basically management all the way up.

But man, once you get a bunch them aligned and motivated the sky is the limit.