I'm an industrial electrician. I have zero fears of being replaced by any any sort of AI. Maybe by someone younger and smarter, but I have 38 years experience. The trades are a decent living, and lots of people could do worse.
> The trades are a decent living, and lots of people could do worse.
I sure hope this remains true after the number of people trying to become electricians quintuples in size.
I feel like in a lot of these discussions, people think about themselves first and go “I’ll just become an electrician if my white collar job goes away, how bad could it be?” But then you need to realize that many many people are going to have this problem, and the phrasing “Well, we’ll all just become electricians if our white collar jobs go away.” doesn’t have the same ring to it.
It’s not enough for there to EXIST non-automatable jobs. The demand for those jobs must be so massive that a gigantic number of currently well-paid people can take jobs in the sector without massively depressing wages.
I think locality is the difference. Electricians and Plumbers are needed basically everywhere. Conversely, there’s not much of a local market for bespoke software development in random towns in the US. While, yes, there are various contractors with statewide coverage, Joe-with-a-pickup-truck who treats the neighbors right in town still wins out many times.
But you need to realize that both professions aren’t valued the same everywhere.
In my childhood in the Soviet Union “plumber” was what parents scared their kids with “if you don’t study, you’ll become a plumber”. And that profession was extremely undesirable and didn’t pay well.
Also in many SEA countries both professions aren’t paid well.
I think in North America it’s different because it’s highly regulated and barrier for entry is high.
I think a lot of people in America talk about plumbers as this sort of “aspirational blue-collar job” because they forget how dirty it is. Like, the usual boomer framing is to talk about how you know a guy who makes $100K as a plumber, mumble something about unions and then go “100K to fix sinks sure sounds nice”.
What that framing misses is that a lot of plumbers have to fix situations where a sewer line ruptured and someone’s basement is covered in shit. Or like, you get called in because someone’s garbage disposal is clogged with something nasty, and the person won’t tell you what it is. Plumbers definitely should get paid a lot for what they do, though whether that’s actual true varies.
This is why being a septic guy seems like a good gig. I paid my septic guy $10k for one day's labor, with about $4k in materials to come in with a massive excavator and one helper.
I'm sure the cost of his excavator ran into ~$1k of wear/depreciation over that day but two men basically cleared $5k in a combined 20 man hours.
If you can deal with poop you can make a lot of money. Doesn't seem to be much interest in that trade either, no one thinks to become a septic installer.
The big upside here is that more web designers make more web sites, but more electricians and crafts people make more houses eventually (whatever is most valuable) and we can use more of that.
More tradespeople don't make more housing, capital and legislation do. Both capital and legislators (a disturbing number of whom are either landlords or realestate tycoons) are perversely incentivised to keep housing supplies low because that creates a market in which housing appreciates and generates more income than a market in which housing is plentiful.
People need to stop with this whole “more people on $job means more of $product” thing. I know that’s what they teach in freshmen economics, but it’s almost never true in reality.
The reality is that if you have a skill and there are no jobs, if the skill is something you can practice on your own as a freelancer or entrepreneur, you will do it. And if your skill allows you to make something that disproportionately earns a lot of money, like housing, you will see people doing it. I come from the future - Eastern Europe, a place that endured extreme hyperinflation, poverty, and started generating growth again not long ago.
I can't believe nobody has brought this up, but the threat isn't even that there will be too many electricians. The threat is the question: "who is going to pay for these electricians at all?"
It's such a privileged first world attitude to just assume that no matter how bad it gets, we'll always have all this money to pay for expert labor for our homes and businesses.
The idea never even comes up that if the economy gets pushed too far and the middle class truly disappears, nobody can afford a plumber or an electrician. You either make do or go without. And that entire sector of work crumbles too, which creates a feedback loop for economic failure.
Brief anecdote: A friend hired an electrician to wire some things and he asked how the electrician's business was going. The reply was (paraphrased): We hired seven people two weeks ago, now only one is left because the rest either didn't show up, couldn't show up regularly, or couldn't focus on tasks long enough to get work done. We let them go because this is electricity. We are not going to pay for anyone's funeral!
My grandpa was a master electrician. My father was a master electrician. I am a software engineer. I am sweating. I feel like we have another 2 or 3 years and then it might be over. I will go work in the mines.
Same here, however with the new meta glasses or the augmented reality glasses you're going to see people with no knowledge of our field actually troubleshooting machines with technicians remotely. They will be paid a lot less than us.
I wonder who will be held at fault when the low-paid in-person troubleshooter discovers 15kV with his fingers (I do not wonder who will be killed) while his lock opens the wrong breaker.
The business is not broken and does not need "fixing."
But it is broken. There is a shortage of every type of trades worker. Sure it's been great for existing trade folks because there are plenty of jobs and the pay is great more demand than supply. But the lack of supply has meant that it's too expensive to build/fix stuff. If you're in the US look around. It looks like we literally stopped building in the 1950s. Every renovation/building project is multi-year. Why? The lack of plentiful skilled trades people is one of the reasons the US building and infrastructure are deteriorating.
Home electricians will always be fine. But if you work under a manager, I guarantee you some in your business will start to use AI to micromanage you if nothing is done. Hopefully I'm too negative.
Maybe, but with youtube I ran the service entry, underground secondary, a multi-structure multi-panel electrical system distribution and the residential inside. I have zero electrician training.
Our county eliminated building codes, licensing requirements, and inspections so now everybody just does it themselves. The electricians here are going to the wayside unless they work for the power company. Us 'DIYers' have mostly replaced them by sharing knowledge and accumulating the wealth of knowledge prior held tightly by tradesman who have attempted to overplay their hand by charging exorbitant rates and refusing to hiring apprentices and are at a dead end.
Doesn't seem like much. We eliminated electrical (and other) inspections and paperwork 20+ years ago and none of the paranoid delusions of the nay-sayers came true.
I sell and run electrical work and I don’t see any good use for LLMs for what I do on a day to day basis.
LLMs don’t understand constructions drawings so they’re no help when it comes to doing a takeoff. Construction specifications are already well-organized and able to be searched so LLMs don’t help there.
They can’t synthesize information from different sources (words from a person spoken on a phone conversation, napkin sketches, information that is embedded in an electricians head about a specific facility, etc) or coordinate multiple parties through a variety of communication methods (email, text, phone calls, RFIs, in-person meetings, etc)
About the only use I’ve found for them in my line of work is cleaning up data from outside sources. YMMV. Construction is a very relationship and trust based business that has been around longer than almost every other profession.
I think back to a 1991-1992 when someone stood over my shoulder watching and telling me what a waste of time it was and who they hell is ever going to use it :)). I remind them from time to time and we have a good laugh.
The problem with Blue-collar work under AI is that your white collar AI manager can fork itself and have infinite time to micromanage you.
I foresee people being asked to wear AR glasses and/or work in a digital camera panopticon to be constantly evaluated on performance and compliance with (disconnected and disaffected) policy (imagine if your checkbox-first-results-never corporate compliance officer can design new checkboxes 100x as fast as a human one could have). When the machines can real-time analyze and provide "corrective" feedback or "training" to a pool of juniors who don't feel like they deserve rights or pay and have never even heard of a union, the value of skill in labor drops to nothing, and only people who are able to perform blind obedience will be valuable in the market.
If management is infinite heartless machines chasing profit motive, then every job becomes Amazon Fulfillment on steroids.
> I foresee people being asked to wear AR glasses and/or work in a digital camera panopticon to be constantly evaluated on performance and compliance with (disconnected and disaffected) policy
No need to foresee; this is already happening. Remote surveillance of work performed, with an AI determining, based on realtime video or photos, whether you performed the job correctly or not. Some companies are doing this now, particularly in industries where it's expensive to send someone out to fix something if it wasn't done exactly right the first time. But it's easily applied all down the line.
Plenty of large companies only hire union contractors for electrical, mechanical, and plumbing systems (aka skilled trades, or trades that can damage a building if installation is done poorly)
And a long one at that. I’m sure I could do well as an electrician eventually, but there’s no way I could make it through 4+ years as an apprentice making $21/hr, and then another three as a journeyman (even if it pays double). Maybe when my house is paid off (but who’s going to hire a 50yr old apprentice?).
The biggest problem with an apprenticeship model is that it creates a bottleneck to getting people into the trades. You need competent journeymen (and knowing the trade isn’t enough, they need to be able to teach) who ideally can take on more than one apprentice at a time. But no matter how much everyone “wants young people in the trades” and no matter how much of a “shortage of tradespeople” there is, the bigger shortage is apprentice positions. Every kid in the world could suddenly decide they want to be electricians and plumbers, and it would still take two generations to fill the ranks.
Note that I’m mostly focusing on trades that require state licensing. Laborers, carpenters, painters, plasterers, welders, etc. don’t suffer this problem as much, because there is no set amount of time for someone to be an apprentice. If you’re good and reliable you’re getting promoted fast. I’m not against licensing per se, but I am strongly against legislated work requirements for a job.
I know I could study for a week and pass the master electrician exam on Monday.
This is largely why I (almost 50, and who likes doing casual electrical work and has tools and knows some things) don't try to get into that trade.
If I have to start making money again, I might go into something like low-voltage install where there's not any licensing and my network admin and electronics skills might help.
I enjoy electrical install work- I put a solar power system up in the off grid cabins where I live- not big (4kw panels, 6kw inverter, 15kwh battery), but it has been fun wiring in a panel and placing outlets in the shacks.
What doesn't sound fun is 4 years of $20/hr work working for who the hell knows.
There's quite a few places in the US where no electrician license is required to be an electrician.
Alternatively where I live (Arizona) a license is required to offer services but as long as the contractor is licensed the guy doing the actual work doesn't have to be, so in practice there are ways to minimize the licensing problem by having a license holder just be a shell company holder of your electrical service
agreed, the trades intentionally restrict who can become trained. its the reason they are called trades in the first place. restrict labor supply to pump up their own wages
Switzerland and Germany have very good systems for apprenticeships.
However, one of the challenges is to find them as you said. Apprentices typically start at a young age (16) and you have wildly different levels of maturity there. Another issue is that many jobs aren’t attractive to locals (anymore), and immigrants fight the uphill battle of having to learn the language, culture etc.
Mentioned in the article text, but not the title, is the fact that blue collar work typically does not require a college degree. You can start getting paid immediately after high school. Contrasted with a possible alternate path of four to five years of undergrad at a third tier college paying $80k/yr and financed at an 11% APR...
The real secular arc here predating the GenAI rush has been the decreasing ROI of a generic college degree.
Another interesting thing in the article, that also isn't in the headline, is a link to Goldman Sachs' assessment of how much AI is actually threatening office work:
"Despite concerns about widespread job losses, AI adoption is expected to have only a modest and relatively temporary impact on employment levels. Goldman Sachs Research estimates that unemployment will increase by half a percentage point during the AI transition period as displaced workers seek new positions."
People are going to be surprised when the cheap humanoid robots out of China get paired with transformer models for planning and control.
I got a bit caught with my pants down between GPT2, which was so hyped, and GPT3.5 which was also hyped but the delta between reality and Sam's bullshit was much smaller. I've been keeping my eye out on both the hardware and software and we're in the pre-gpt2 days for robotics right now. There's a lot of cute little results that need a few million dollars to get put together.
The next 5 years will make the effect of transformers on office work since 2022 seem like a slight breeze compared to a tornado.
Blanket characterization of regulation, as malicious barriers to AI adoption, creates the perfect smoke screen to deflect discussion of the actual problems we are seeing.
The law you linked to prohibits firms from using AI to provide therapy, this doesn’t stop people from doing it anyway. It’s a far cry from saying that knowledge workers are rushing to erect legal barriers to AI adoption.
A large number of knowledge workers are busy trying to increase adoption of AI, a behavior at odds with your claim.
That this argument is made, in a forum populated by knowledge workers, is ironic.
Most professional services already have a moat around them in that you need to be licensed in order to practice the profession; AI can’t disrupt these industries because A) after three years, the hallucination issue has not improved and B) the AI itself can’t legally perform most of the services a licensed professional is permitted to provide.
It’s easy to write off this sort of regulation as economic protectionism if you’re a true believer in the technology, but from personal experience, the LLMs I have used are only really good for solving well-understood programming problems and doing what Google used to do 10 years ago. You can maybe use them to power some blackhat marketing efforts but most of what I’ve seen there are just run-of-the-mill spam operations that have discovered Reddit.
Society has multiple classes with distinct interests. It’s not just “owners versus workers.” In the U.S., the top 0.1% own about 14% of the wealth, but most of the rest is owned by the top 25% outside the top 0.1%. Within this class there is a spectrum of “ownership.” Tim Cook is technically a worker, but he has “owner” wealth. But he came into that wealth by being a worker—he never risked his own capital to start a business, nor did he inherit assets. This is especially true for knowledge work, where putative workers typically are non-fungible in ways that give them a great deal of leverage with owners.
Almost half the world is children, elderly, or disabled. The first two have reduced capacity to run a business and the latter have reduced earning capacity to obtain the business.
Once you consider maybe half of all humans even have the chance to become owners, even if it means building something out of nothing, you don't have such a bad chance of being in the 50% of the 50%. Bad luck happens, but if you can avoid divorce/illness/drugs/laziness there is a very good chance you could own something to make you an owner-capitalist even if it is just a hot dog stand in Timbuktu.
That study defines “elite” as the top 10% of income earners, which is mostly skilled and knowledge workers, not owners. I can’t access the PDF but there was a reddit thread about the methodology: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskSocialScience/comments/73nbuv/in.... So that is consistent with my point that knowledge workers have lots of political power.
Also, Vox did a piece discussing subsequent research that suggests that whatever effect Gilens and Page are seeing is relatively weak: https://www.vox.com/2016/5/9/11502464/gilens-page-oligarchy-.... I suspect you’d find a stronger correlation if you compared knowledge workers versus blue collar workers (I.e. accounted for the fact that you have fairly affluent tradespeople and medium income knowledge workers, like entry level folks who work in marketing).
>That study defines “elite” as the top 10% of income earners
The study does not define elite that way, it simply notes that the likelihood of a policy being implemented trends upward with income.
>that is consistent with my point that knowledge workers have lots of political power.
I cant see anything on this reddit thread which indicates this.
>Also, Vox did a piece discussing subsequent research that suggests
Im sure they did. It's not unusual for corporate backed think tanks to push back on studies which run counter to their narrative. The same thing happened with r>g, minimum wage increases across state borders, etc.
The quote from the paper on the reddit thread discusses dividing people into income quintiles. I assume you actually read the paper and understand the methodology?
It showed a direct correlation between income and your impact on policy.
It would, alas, be scientifically illiterate to assume that since they divided the public into 10 quintiles that the correlation suddenly stopped above the 90.1% threshold.
And, it would be regular old illitetate to assume that crossing from 89.9% to 90% puts you firmly in the cateogory of "elite" because of how a study divided up income quintiles.
There is a difference between a true elite (e.g. gets put in charge of a government department of your own creation) and somebody who just earns a lot of money and generally benefits from tax breaks lobbied for by those elites.
AI therapy is hardly a good example of trying to erect barriers to AI adoption. I don’t think they’re trying to protect practitioners they’re trying to protect patients.
I will be absolutely shocked if there is any real attempt to regulate AI adoption. Capitalists gotta capital.
Who do you think is spending money lobbying politicians to ban this? Do you think it's a depressed patients activist group who is scared someone might try to sell them a cheap always available AI therapist?
Or do you think it's a therapist group who just so happens to be pushing for barriers that protect their jobs while gaslighting themselves into thinking it's to protect their patients.
What level of institutional and cultural acceptance, de jure or de facto, would be needed to make you feel otherwise here?
Like on its face, looking around the world, this sentiment feels absurd right now. We are moving mountains to build this stuff up. AI is not the lowly underdog here, it is immediately the top of the food chain.
If things are not moving fast enough for you, that feels more like personal contradiction you are working through here. Like it almost sounds like you want this to be the 90s again and be a Cypherpunk advocating for cause, but you look around and actually you're already the suits, the feds; you're on top, and the virtuous fight for freedom was null and void from the start. So all you can do is force yourself into feeling like a victim always already. September was too short!
Except not really, as evidenced by China hamstringing private rollout of AI tools like facial recognition or data-based surveillance and retaining those solely for the government’s use. They know that whatever issues the US is grappling with now, they’re not too far behind, and they have the added benefit of learning from our mistakes.
Governments have as much to fear from mass labor displacement as they do to gain from AI-turbocharged surveillance and warfare. It’s why competent regimes will tighten rules to stem or stop unnecessary bleeding and preserve their power.
Who are these trades going to sell their services to when a large proportion of people employed in white collar work are looking at a prospect of reduced income or loss of jobs?
The economy functioned without large numbers of office workers in the past, and there are regions of the country where this is still the case. To an extent they will sell their services to each other. To another extent they will be selling to the owners of AI (imagine an electrician building out a data center). The economic surplus will still be there - it will be larger in fact - and there will still be a need for their services. The players involved will change however.
“In the past” trades did not enjoy nearly the income levels they do now. The rise in demand for their services and corresponding raise in their compensation are linked to the wealth of the other half of the economy.
I think it'll be a while (10-20 years?) until we have AGI good enough to at least potentially replace a non-trivial number of workers as opposed to just being a productivity tool. LLMs are clearly just a tool.
We will of course eventually create human-level AGI, but things like emotions and empathy will come later, if at all, which may limit its utility in interacting with humans and therefore usefulness for many jobs.
The major job categories that AGI might be capable of is "professional and business" office jobs and many government jobs, which each account for about 15% of US jobs, but what that leaves is the other 70% which includes not only "blue collar" jobs such as trades, manufacturing, construction, transportation, but also major employers such as healthcare, education, leisure & hospitality, etc.
The future doesn't always turn out as expected though, especially when it comes to sci-fi visions of people in flying cars, living on mars, etc. AGI and robotics may well turn out to be the same - we may imagine humanoid robots and human-like "remote workers" doing many jobs, but it'll probably not be like that. Humanoid workers are probably about as likely as flying cars - problematic and just not that useful. AGI "workers" may well be just agents that are given well defined tasks to execute as opposed to fully autonomous human worker replacements.
Our gestating Machine God doesn't yet have hands as good as ours, so good this is good advice.
We had a system of overproduction of sentient office equipment, who waste their time on pointless Zoom calls and sending emails that no one reads. That had to end sooner or later, and was already about to collapse on its own. BS job holders are miserable anyway. Let's give these people purpose (closing the gap between activity and tangible output), free them from debt-slavery, and fix all the broken infrastructure around us.
Nope. Try TIG on aluminum or titanium. I will never be able to do this well enough to get certified because, simply put, I'm well past my prime dexterity years. But I can still write some damn fine embedded code.
I would guess higher but it's based on personal experience. Compared to freelance software devs, I know a lot more "sole proprietor" handymen type guys, i.e. they specialize in bathroom and kitchen renovations, or other "home improvement" jobs that one guy can do by himself or maybe with a helper.
The real tradesmen (plumbers, electricians, etc.) will often start their own businesses, especially once they get to know and be known by the local contractors, and end up doing bigger new construction jobs with dozens of employees. The comparable white-collar version of this would be the experienced developer or marketer who starts their own consultancy or agency.
I think it would be more rare to see a true "start up" in the blue collar world. Most of their work is regulated by code and there isn't as much room to compete on innovation, you have to compete on reputation and experience and that can't be substituted by VC money.
When I see stories like this all I can think of is that rich people must really hate paying their blue collar workers market value and want to flood the market to lower their wages and bargaining ability. Especially when I hear how hard it is to actually get a proper blue collar job (that isn't just a manual labor with a bit of carpentry job paying below a living wage) and be apprenticed in it from my blue collar friends.
I mean, good? We need more tradespeople than we do office workers - and we need everyone in both fields to be paid substantially more than they presently earn, which will only come about through new business creation, something tradespeople dominate. Software engineers won’t power the green energy transformation so much as skilled electricians, architects, contractors, and builders. More finance people won’t replace aging and inefficient infrastructure so much as more road workers, pipe fitters, plumbers, and wastewater engineers.
I think the current (over)hype around LLMs replacing jobs wholesale is an excellent catalyst for this shift, but I also acknowledge that the pendulum was already naturally swinging that way after decades of over-prioritizing white collar work as the only means of joining the shrinking middle class.
Agreed. If this also raises the social status of blue collar work / workers - I mean that someone with a college degree won't feel ashamed to work in the trades, or that, say, a diesel mechanic wouldn't feel out of place at a book club - this will also be a positive development.
This doesn’t raise the status of blue collar workers because there are only so many plumbing jobs out there.
Don’t get me wrong - The trades are good, and were simply not “sexy” for a long while.
There was a reason people wanted their kids to do white collar work. Trades are dependent on economic cycles, and work can dry up. It’s also manual labor, which takes a toll on you physically.
In the end - neither white collar nor blue collar matter much, since neither guarantee a retirement anymore. The AI job apocalypse (if it happens) will be taking out the last life boat left standing.
We had manufacturing to move people from agrarian work to middle class life. That’s gone - automation has gotten to the point of lights out manufacturing. This has left only services.
Ps: I doubt AI will actually be the powerhouse it is being hailed as. There is a different between an MVP and having to maintain technical debt.
Agreed. If you have to work for a living, you’re part of the same class as everyone else - and just as capable of intelligence, empathy, and accomplishment. Metaphorical collar colors are irrelevant.
Because I'm from working class, rust belt and ive seen the reality the state of America blue collar, not just the "the guy who installed my TV said he owns his own business and makes almost as much as me working in software" fantasy.
I've also had a front row seat to "just learn JavaScript" go from great career advice to joke in the span of time it'd take you to finish a trade apprenticeship.
Blue collar jobs are only going to be the go-to for as long as the labor supply is lower than the commercial demand, which I doubt will be long (if this is even the case now). It takes a non-neglible amount of time to train (or certify) for these jobs in much of the western world, which means that any bump in demand is met with a significant lag in supply. Once that supply catches up, the momentum of people saying "bro just go to trade school instead of college, plumbers/electricians/welders/dirt farmers make $100k" is going to dump thousands and thousands of juniors into a market that will very quickly oversaturate. We are witnessing this at an accelerated rate with software development and other tech jobs, largely due to extreme external factors (high interest rates limiting VC cash flow, Trump's hostile domestic economic policies[0], demonstrable downward pressure on employment mobility and wage suppression from big tech[1]).
The american "middle class" is still shrinking, but now it's shrinking faster than ever before, largely because the capital class wants more money, and there is one more stone to bleed. Creating a market of blue collar professionals who will be blackballed from white collar markets due to their educational and work histories (in tandem with the desired outcome of using AI workloads for these jobs in lieu of people) will raise the commercial value of these white collar services, while gatekeeping their entry and stagnating/lowering their compensation. The ladder is being set on fire.
"AI will kill white collar, those people should just go into trades, they can become plumbers".
Great idea, except that's not how supply/demand works.
AI didn't create the need for more toilets.
This is another recycled version of the "college is a scam" trope that comes around during every recession. I first experienced it firsthand when I graduated smack dab in the middle of the Great Recession of 2008-09. Those who had majored in the so-called "basket weaving" disciplines were doomed, while those in "job-ready" disciplines like comp sci, accounting and finance were also doomed, but marginally less so as they'd bounce back when the S&P500 did.
It's far too simple to say "train to be a plumber" or HVAC, construction, or auto mechanic or whatever people latch on to as "future-proof / recession-proof". The reluctance to take these jobs is not the resistance to doing manual labour, but that lifetime income is limited unless you're the boss.
As with any role in a broadly non-unionized labour market, you only make proper money if you incorporate, strike deals of your own, hire people and pay yourself multiples more than the labour. Otherwise, your time, labour and frankly, bodily integrity is at the mercy of whoever signs your paychecks. And just like every other industry, only a small proportion of workers are cut out to be biz dev or people managers, and as a boss, you need to be able to do both.
Demand for electricians or mechanics will not grow proportionately with growth in electrician training programs, any more than SW Eng jobs did with the growth of bootcamps in the 2010s. The difference was that coding jobs were often paid for on the back of venture capital, or on the back of a giant, profitable corporation. The trades are not like that, you can't be paid more than what the company brings in revenue-wise.
Similar story here, learned to program during the dotcom bust. Everyone including Scott Adams was obsessed with tech being a dead end because of offshoring to India. Starting in mid-00's with no education at 18, I've never had to worry about money or a job. Maybe offshoring made a difference but do I care? Especially early on, companies were thrilled to find someone local who wanted to and was able to code. Just like they're blown away recently by someone who can work without ChatGPT and isn't in the field because mommy made them do it. It's incredible how little things change. But sure, go become plumber, lord knows I need one sometimes.
I wonder what effects this will have in the long run, as people attuned to white-collar labor and culture begin to assume jobs usually held by people who aren’t...
I generally don’t believe in Panacea’s, and if these jobs were so great and the solution to all our problems, why is it when we live in a country where a large percentage of folks are rural or otherwise have blue collar values, there not pursuing them?
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying all blue collar jobs are bad, many are fantastic! But like all things, it’s likely a pyramid. Just like a lot of software engineering jobs are shitty.
If it is offered as a panacea, then the glut of applicants will just drive down wages.
The safest are the licensed professions because numbers of new entrants are regulated by cartel and people won't be able to let go of the demand because again, regulations. Simply put, safest jobs will be red-taped sinecures.
Something that bugs me about all these articles. It’s all bullshit. Almost any future is possible at this point and the data can be analyzed in almost any way. Could be AI, could be the economy, could be vibes. You’ll just get stupider reading all this shit.
A huge problem of articles in general is that they are made to entertain you rather than inform you because of ad-driven incentives. It's indeed all bullshit.
I am UX Researcher, Designer and UI Developer. Up until a week ago (company gave permission to use GPT) per some tests I did (personally) with GPT i thought indeed it can do my job yet as of today and using GPT 5...
Logo & Graphic Creation....
- Does this the best so far, but asking it to edit a graphic it created / you liked it doesn't always do what you asked. So, playing with GPT to get it right vs. taking what it initially gave you (same as going to a stock photo site and finding graphics to manipulate) and opening Photoshop is still same amount of time. So here GPT is just another stock photo site like resource yet can take TIME to generate. Is it pulling from a stock site anyway?
- Web Design
On your first attempt to ask it to create a solid web design it works good yet asking it to make edits to it forget lol. It will go and create totally new design and at times on the first attempt it chooses to create a design with a width of 800px (cutting off the left and right sides of the full design).
Front-End Coding...
It does not host images and or provide an entire zip of a website it coded. My Front-End skills are still needed until it provides a zip and handles images properly!
UX Research...
These skills I feel are safest from AI as it requires interfacing with users!
I'm an industrial electrician. I have zero fears of being replaced by any any sort of AI. Maybe by someone younger and smarter, but I have 38 years experience. The trades are a decent living, and lots of people could do worse.
> The trades are a decent living, and lots of people could do worse.
I sure hope this remains true after the number of people trying to become electricians quintuples in size.
I feel like in a lot of these discussions, people think about themselves first and go “I’ll just become an electrician if my white collar job goes away, how bad could it be?” But then you need to realize that many many people are going to have this problem, and the phrasing “Well, we’ll all just become electricians if our white collar jobs go away.” doesn’t have the same ring to it.
It’s not enough for there to EXIST non-automatable jobs. The demand for those jobs must be so massive that a gigantic number of currently well-paid people can take jobs in the sector without massively depressing wages.
I think locality is the difference. Electricians and Plumbers are needed basically everywhere. Conversely, there’s not much of a local market for bespoke software development in random towns in the US. While, yes, there are various contractors with statewide coverage, Joe-with-a-pickup-truck who treats the neighbors right in town still wins out many times.
But you need to realize that both professions aren’t valued the same everywhere.
In my childhood in the Soviet Union “plumber” was what parents scared their kids with “if you don’t study, you’ll become a plumber”. And that profession was extremely undesirable and didn’t pay well.
Also in many SEA countries both professions aren’t paid well.
I think in North America it’s different because it’s highly regulated and barrier for entry is high.
I think a lot of people in America talk about plumbers as this sort of “aspirational blue-collar job” because they forget how dirty it is. Like, the usual boomer framing is to talk about how you know a guy who makes $100K as a plumber, mumble something about unions and then go “100K to fix sinks sure sounds nice”.
What that framing misses is that a lot of plumbers have to fix situations where a sewer line ruptured and someone’s basement is covered in shit. Or like, you get called in because someone’s garbage disposal is clogged with something nasty, and the person won’t tell you what it is. Plumbers definitely should get paid a lot for what they do, though whether that’s actual true varies.
This is why being a septic guy seems like a good gig. I paid my septic guy $10k for one day's labor, with about $4k in materials to come in with a massive excavator and one helper.
I'm sure the cost of his excavator ran into ~$1k of wear/depreciation over that day but two men basically cleared $5k in a combined 20 man hours.
If you can deal with poop you can make a lot of money. Doesn't seem to be much interest in that trade either, no one thinks to become a septic installer.
Humans being who they are, there's still a tremendous amount of work to do in this world (and beyond).
Does everyone alive already have the best quality of life imaginable, not to mention future generations?
Lump of Labor fallacy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lump_of_labour_fallacy
Comparative Advantage: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_advantage
*The key challenge* we all share is making the transition as smooth as possible for everyone involved.
The big upside here is that more web designers make more web sites, but more electricians and crafts people make more houses eventually (whatever is most valuable) and we can use more of that.
More tradespeople don't make more housing, capital and legislation do. Both capital and legislators (a disturbing number of whom are either landlords or realestate tycoons) are perversely incentivised to keep housing supplies low because that creates a market in which housing appreciates and generates more income than a market in which housing is plentiful.
This isn’t just housing. After Covid the entire market for everything complex or needed shifted to demand side.
Build less charge more applies to practically everything.
People need to stop with this whole “more people on $job means more of $product” thing. I know that’s what they teach in freshmen economics, but it’s almost never true in reality.
The reality is that if you have a skill and there are no jobs, if the skill is something you can practice on your own as a freelancer or entrepreneur, you will do it. And if your skill allows you to make something that disproportionately earns a lot of money, like housing, you will see people doing it. I come from the future - Eastern Europe, a place that endured extreme hyperinflation, poverty, and started generating growth again not long ago.
Not only that, but enough people need to be earning money outside of the trades to be able to afford to pay for the services of those in the trades.
It's like the economic version of "who will watch the watchers"?
I can't believe nobody has brought this up, but the threat isn't even that there will be too many electricians. The threat is the question: "who is going to pay for these electricians at all?"
It's such a privileged first world attitude to just assume that no matter how bad it gets, we'll always have all this money to pay for expert labor for our homes and businesses.
The idea never even comes up that if the economy gets pushed too far and the middle class truly disappears, nobody can afford a plumber or an electrician. You either make do or go without. And that entire sector of work crumbles too, which creates a feedback loop for economic failure.
That why we call it a house of cards.
Brief anecdote: A friend hired an electrician to wire some things and he asked how the electrician's business was going. The reply was (paraphrased): We hired seven people two weeks ago, now only one is left because the rest either didn't show up, couldn't show up regularly, or couldn't focus on tasks long enough to get work done. We let them go because this is electricity. We are not going to pay for anyone's funeral!
My grandpa was a master electrician. My father was a master electrician. I am a software engineer. I am sweating. I feel like we have another 2 or 3 years and then it might be over. I will go work in the mines.
Same here, however with the new meta glasses or the augmented reality glasses you're going to see people with no knowledge of our field actually troubleshooting machines with technicians remotely. They will be paid a lot less than us.
I wonder who will be held at fault when the low-paid in-person troubleshooter discovers 15kV with his fingers (I do not wonder who will be killed) while his lock opens the wrong breaker.
The business is not broken and does not need "fixing."
But it is broken. There is a shortage of every type of trades worker. Sure it's been great for existing trade folks because there are plenty of jobs and the pay is great more demand than supply. But the lack of supply has meant that it's too expensive to build/fix stuff. If you're in the US look around. It looks like we literally stopped building in the 1950s. Every renovation/building project is multi-year. Why? The lack of plentiful skilled trades people is one of the reasons the US building and infrastructure are deteriorating.
> The business is not broken and does not need "fixing."
Welcome to tech, that’s what we do here.
Home electricians will always be fine. But if you work under a manager, I guarantee you some in your business will start to use AI to micromanage you if nothing is done. Hopefully I'm too negative.
Maybe, but with youtube I ran the service entry, underground secondary, a multi-structure multi-panel electrical system distribution and the residential inside. I have zero electrician training.
Our county eliminated building codes, licensing requirements, and inspections so now everybody just does it themselves. The electricians here are going to the wayside unless they work for the power company. Us 'DIYers' have mostly replaced them by sharing knowledge and accumulating the wealth of knowledge prior held tightly by tradesman who have attempted to overplay their hand by charging exorbitant rates and refusing to hiring apprentices and are at a dead end.
What could go wrong!
Doesn't seem like much. We eliminated electrical (and other) inspections and paperwork 20+ years ago and none of the paranoid delusions of the nay-sayers came true.
I sell and run electrical work and I don’t see any good use for LLMs for what I do on a day to day basis.
LLMs don’t understand constructions drawings so they’re no help when it comes to doing a takeoff. Construction specifications are already well-organized and able to be searched so LLMs don’t help there.
They can’t synthesize information from different sources (words from a person spoken on a phone conversation, napkin sketches, information that is embedded in an electricians head about a specific facility, etc) or coordinate multiple parties through a variety of communication methods (email, text, phone calls, RFIs, in-person meetings, etc)
About the only use I’ve found for them in my line of work is cleaning up data from outside sources. YMMV. Construction is a very relationship and trust based business that has been around longer than almost every other profession.
Yes, totally agree. LLMs are largely pattern recognition. They cant reason.
“The internet is a passing fad”
I think back to a 1991-1992 when someone stood over my shoulder watching and telling me what a waste of time it was and who they hell is ever going to use it :)). I remind them from time to time and we have a good laugh.
Ah yes, the same quote often used by cryptocurrency enthusiasts.
"One time a new tech succeeded despite skepticism, therefore all new tech will succeed despite skepticism"
Distributed ledger/blockchain is an interesting idea but far too energy intensive to be of practical use.
And then theres the whole concept of what currency actually is.
The problem with Blue-collar work under AI is that your white collar AI manager can fork itself and have infinite time to micromanage you.
I foresee people being asked to wear AR glasses and/or work in a digital camera panopticon to be constantly evaluated on performance and compliance with (disconnected and disaffected) policy (imagine if your checkbox-first-results-never corporate compliance officer can design new checkboxes 100x as fast as a human one could have). When the machines can real-time analyze and provide "corrective" feedback or "training" to a pool of juniors who don't feel like they deserve rights or pay and have never even heard of a union, the value of skill in labor drops to nothing, and only people who are able to perform blind obedience will be valuable in the market.
If management is infinite heartless machines chasing profit motive, then every job becomes Amazon Fulfillment on steroids.
No-one will be spared.
If you say so. I will continue to get shit done and get paid well.
You take care of the checkboxes mate
> I foresee people being asked to wear AR glasses and/or work in a digital camera panopticon to be constantly evaluated on performance and compliance with (disconnected and disaffected) policy
No need to foresee; this is already happening. Remote surveillance of work performed, with an AI determining, based on realtime video or photos, whether you performed the job correctly or not. Some companies are doing this now, particularly in industries where it's expensive to send someone out to fix something if it wasn't done exactly right the first time. But it's easily applied all down the line.
Why do you think they would not hear about unions?
Because they'd never hire, but subcontract down to the bone.
Plenty of large companies only hire union contractors for electrical, mechanical, and plumbing systems (aka skilled trades, or trades that can damage a building if installation is done poorly)
A lot of blue-collar jobs require apprenticeships. You can read complaints in several countries about how hard it is to find one.
And a long one at that. I’m sure I could do well as an electrician eventually, but there’s no way I could make it through 4+ years as an apprentice making $21/hr, and then another three as a journeyman (even if it pays double). Maybe when my house is paid off (but who’s going to hire a 50yr old apprentice?).
The biggest problem with an apprenticeship model is that it creates a bottleneck to getting people into the trades. You need competent journeymen (and knowing the trade isn’t enough, they need to be able to teach) who ideally can take on more than one apprentice at a time. But no matter how much everyone “wants young people in the trades” and no matter how much of a “shortage of tradespeople” there is, the bigger shortage is apprentice positions. Every kid in the world could suddenly decide they want to be electricians and plumbers, and it would still take two generations to fill the ranks.
Note that I’m mostly focusing on trades that require state licensing. Laborers, carpenters, painters, plasterers, welders, etc. don’t suffer this problem as much, because there is no set amount of time for someone to be an apprentice. If you’re good and reliable you’re getting promoted fast. I’m not against licensing per se, but I am strongly against legislated work requirements for a job.
I know I could study for a week and pass the master electrician exam on Monday.
Yeah, I agree.
This is largely why I (almost 50, and who likes doing casual electrical work and has tools and knows some things) don't try to get into that trade.
If I have to start making money again, I might go into something like low-voltage install where there's not any licensing and my network admin and electronics skills might help.
I enjoy electrical install work- I put a solar power system up in the off grid cabins where I live- not big (4kw panels, 6kw inverter, 15kwh battery), but it has been fun wiring in a panel and placing outlets in the shacks.
What doesn't sound fun is 4 years of $20/hr work working for who the hell knows.
There's quite a few places in the US where no electrician license is required to be an electrician.
Alternatively where I live (Arizona) a license is required to offer services but as long as the contractor is licensed the guy doing the actual work doesn't have to be, so in practice there are ways to minimize the licensing problem by having a license holder just be a shell company holder of your electrical service
agreed, the trades intentionally restrict who can become trained. its the reason they are called trades in the first place. restrict labor supply to pump up their own wages
Switzerland and Germany have very good systems for apprenticeships.
However, one of the challenges is to find them as you said. Apprentices typically start at a young age (16) and you have wildly different levels of maturity there. Another issue is that many jobs aren’t attractive to locals (anymore), and immigrants fight the uphill battle of having to learn the language, culture etc.
Mentioned in the article text, but not the title, is the fact that blue collar work typically does not require a college degree. You can start getting paid immediately after high school. Contrasted with a possible alternate path of four to five years of undergrad at a third tier college paying $80k/yr and financed at an 11% APR...
The real secular arc here predating the GenAI rush has been the decreasing ROI of a generic college degree.
Another interesting thing in the article, that also isn't in the headline, is a link to Goldman Sachs' assessment of how much AI is actually threatening office work:
"Despite concerns about widespread job losses, AI adoption is expected to have only a modest and relatively temporary impact on employment levels. Goldman Sachs Research estimates that unemployment will increase by half a percentage point during the AI transition period as displaced workers seek new positions."
People are going to be surprised when the cheap humanoid robots out of China get paired with transformer models for planning and control.
I got a bit caught with my pants down between GPT2, which was so hyped, and GPT3.5 which was also hyped but the delta between reality and Sam's bullshit was much smaller. I've been keeping my eye out on both the hardware and software and we're in the pre-gpt2 days for robotics right now. There's a lot of cute little results that need a few million dollars to get put together.
The next 5 years will make the effect of transformers on office work since 2022 seem like a slight breeze compared to a tornado.
Given the degree to which knowledge workers dominate politics, the rush to erect legal barriers to AI adoption is going to be rapid. It’s already happening: https://idfpr.illinois.gov/news/2025/gov-pritzker-signs-stat...
Blanket characterization of regulation, as malicious barriers to AI adoption, creates the perfect smoke screen to deflect discussion of the actual problems we are seeing.
The law you linked to prohibits firms from using AI to provide therapy, this doesn’t stop people from doing it anyway. It’s a far cry from saying that knowledge workers are rushing to erect legal barriers to AI adoption.
A large number of knowledge workers are busy trying to increase adoption of AI, a behavior at odds with your claim.
That this argument is made, in a forum populated by knowledge workers, is ironic.
What problem does preventing companies from providing AI back mental health services does this legislation provide except?
> protecting the jobs of Illinois’ thousands of qualified behavioral health providers
Are you unaware that genAI tools reaffirm beliefs of people in manic or delusional states?
Most professional services already have a moat around them in that you need to be licensed in order to practice the profession; AI can’t disrupt these industries because A) after three years, the hallucination issue has not improved and B) the AI itself can’t legally perform most of the services a licensed professional is permitted to provide.
It’s easy to write off this sort of regulation as economic protectionism if you’re a true believer in the technology, but from personal experience, the LLMs I have used are only really good for solving well-understood programming problems and doing what Google used to do 10 years ago. You can maybe use them to power some blackhat marketing efforts but most of what I’ve seen there are just run-of-the-mill spam operations that have discovered Reddit.
Too little too late. I mean we all deserve it tbh, apathetic tribal species.
> knowledge workers^H^H^H^H^H^Howners dominate politics
fixed it for you
Workers do not dominate politics in any way, shape or form. Owners do.
Society has multiple classes with distinct interests. It’s not just “owners versus workers.” In the U.S., the top 0.1% own about 14% of the wealth, but most of the rest is owned by the top 25% outside the top 0.1%. Within this class there is a spectrum of “ownership.” Tim Cook is technically a worker, but he has “owner” wealth. But he came into that wealth by being a worker—he never risked his own capital to start a business, nor did he inherit assets. This is especially true for knowledge work, where putative workers typically are non-fungible in ways that give them a great deal of leverage with owners.
Almost half the world is children, elderly, or disabled. The first two have reduced capacity to run a business and the latter have reduced earning capacity to obtain the business.
Once you consider maybe half of all humans even have the chance to become owners, even if it means building something out of nothing, you don't have such a bad chance of being in the 50% of the 50%. Bad luck happens, but if you can avoid divorce/illness/drugs/laziness there is a very good chance you could own something to make you an owner-capitalist even if it is just a hot dog stand in Timbuktu.
Society does have multiple classes, yes but one in particular dominates politics - the ownership class.
See here for the relevant study: https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-echochambers-27074746
That study defines “elite” as the top 10% of income earners, which is mostly skilled and knowledge workers, not owners. I can’t access the PDF but there was a reddit thread about the methodology: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskSocialScience/comments/73nbuv/in.... So that is consistent with my point that knowledge workers have lots of political power.
Also, Vox did a piece discussing subsequent research that suggests that whatever effect Gilens and Page are seeing is relatively weak: https://www.vox.com/2016/5/9/11502464/gilens-page-oligarchy-.... I suspect you’d find a stronger correlation if you compared knowledge workers versus blue collar workers (I.e. accounted for the fact that you have fairly affluent tradespeople and medium income knowledge workers, like entry level folks who work in marketing).
>That study defines “elite” as the top 10% of income earners
The study does not define elite that way, it simply notes that the likelihood of a policy being implemented trends upward with income.
>that is consistent with my point that knowledge workers have lots of political power.
I cant see anything on this reddit thread which indicates this.
>Also, Vox did a piece discussing subsequent research that suggests
Im sure they did. It's not unusual for corporate backed think tanks to push back on studies which run counter to their narrative. The same thing happened with r>g, minimum wage increases across state borders, etc.
The quote from the paper on the reddit thread discusses dividing people into income quintiles. I assume you actually read the paper and understand the methodology?
It showed a direct correlation between income and your impact on policy.
It would, alas, be scientifically illiterate to assume that since they divided the public into 10 quintiles that the correlation suddenly stopped above the 90.1% threshold.
And, it would be regular old illitetate to assume that crossing from 89.9% to 90% puts you firmly in the cateogory of "elite" because of how a study divided up income quintiles.
There is a difference between a true elite (e.g. gets put in charge of a government department of your own creation) and somebody who just earns a lot of money and generally benefits from tax breaks lobbied for by those elites.
AI therapy is hardly a good example of trying to erect barriers to AI adoption. I don’t think they’re trying to protect practitioners they’re trying to protect patients.
I will be absolutely shocked if there is any real attempt to regulate AI adoption. Capitalists gotta capital.
Who do you think is spending money lobbying politicians to ban this? Do you think it's a depressed patients activist group who is scared someone might try to sell them a cheap always available AI therapist?
Or do you think it's a therapist group who just so happens to be pushing for barriers that protect their jobs while gaslighting themselves into thinking it's to protect their patients.
The first. No one gives a fuck about workers. I hope I’m wrong by the way, nothing would make me happier than LLm’s being regulated out of existence.
What level of institutional and cultural acceptance, de jure or de facto, would be needed to make you feel otherwise here?
Like on its face, looking around the world, this sentiment feels absurd right now. We are moving mountains to build this stuff up. AI is not the lowly underdog here, it is immediately the top of the food chain.
If things are not moving fast enough for you, that feels more like personal contradiction you are working through here. Like it almost sounds like you want this to be the 90s again and be a Cypherpunk advocating for cause, but you look around and actually you're already the suits, the feds; you're on top, and the virtuous fight for freedom was null and void from the start. So all you can do is force yourself into feeling like a victim always already. September was too short!
Yes, just like we rushed to forming unions! /s
Unfortunately I don’t think meritocracy and protectionism make for good roommates inside white collar brains.
It just means countries like China will offer these services and gain an advantage over the US.
Except not really, as evidenced by China hamstringing private rollout of AI tools like facial recognition or data-based surveillance and retaining those solely for the government’s use. They know that whatever issues the US is grappling with now, they’re not too far behind, and they have the added benefit of learning from our mistakes.
Governments have as much to fear from mass labor displacement as they do to gain from AI-turbocharged surveillance and warfare. It’s why competent regimes will tighten rules to stem or stop unnecessary bleeding and preserve their power.
Who are these trades going to sell their services to when a large proportion of people employed in white collar work are looking at a prospect of reduced income or loss of jobs?
The economy functioned without large numbers of office workers in the past, and there are regions of the country where this is still the case. To an extent they will sell their services to each other. To another extent they will be selling to the owners of AI (imagine an electrician building out a data center). The economic surplus will still be there - it will be larger in fact - and there will still be a need for their services. The players involved will change however.
“In the past” trades did not enjoy nearly the income levels they do now. The rise in demand for their services and corresponding raise in their compensation are linked to the wealth of the other half of the economy.
My cousin was a software engineer for two decades. He got laid off and couldn't find a job for two years. He's now a mechanic.
How does he feel about that?
how long did his apprenticeship last, did even need one or did he have an "in"?
How does his pay relate to old software work?
How is the toll on his body?
Does he think he can keep doing it into old age?
I think it'll be a while (10-20 years?) until we have AGI good enough to at least potentially replace a non-trivial number of workers as opposed to just being a productivity tool. LLMs are clearly just a tool.
We will of course eventually create human-level AGI, but things like emotions and empathy will come later, if at all, which may limit its utility in interacting with humans and therefore usefulness for many jobs.
The major job categories that AGI might be capable of is "professional and business" office jobs and many government jobs, which each account for about 15% of US jobs, but what that leaves is the other 70% which includes not only "blue collar" jobs such as trades, manufacturing, construction, transportation, but also major employers such as healthcare, education, leisure & hospitality, etc.
The future doesn't always turn out as expected though, especially when it comes to sci-fi visions of people in flying cars, living on mars, etc. AGI and robotics may well turn out to be the same - we may imagine humanoid robots and human-like "remote workers" doing many jobs, but it'll probably not be like that. Humanoid workers are probably about as likely as flying cars - problematic and just not that useful. AGI "workers" may well be just agents that are given well defined tasks to execute as opposed to fully autonomous human worker replacements.
These always come with the assumption that most white-collar jobs weren't already mostly performative busywork.
Blue collar has plenty of performative busywork too
Our gestating Machine God doesn't yet have hands as good as ours, so good this is good advice.
We had a system of overproduction of sentient office equipment, who waste their time on pointless Zoom calls and sending emails that no one reads. That had to end sooner or later, and was already about to collapse on its own. BS job holders are miserable anyway. Let's give these people purpose (closing the gap between activity and tangible output), free them from debt-slavery, and fix all the broken infrastructure around us.
The idea that aging office workers can learn to weld is even dumber than thinking aging welders can learn to code.
Welding is not hard to learn. It just takes practice.
Nope. Try TIG on aluminum or titanium. I will never be able to do this well enough to get certified because, simply put, I'm well past my prime dexterity years. But I can still write some damn fine embedded code.
...neither of those sound the least bit dumb to me.
Which is why theres evidence that it doesn’t work to help us learn from the mistakes of the past.
Tesla Optimus hands are iterating rapidly and are already incredible.
I know it’s taboo to claim anything positive about any Musk company.
But Optimus is coming. To fold my laundry and do my dishes. And maybe one day strip some wires.
An interesting thing about blue collar work, especially when you’re your own boss, is that when things get more expensive, you can raise your rates
When you have a salary, you’re getting paid what you’re getting paid and nothing more and hoping whatever raise might come is better than inflation
What percentage of blue collar workers are self-employed compared to white collar workers?
I would guess higher but it's based on personal experience. Compared to freelance software devs, I know a lot more "sole proprietor" handymen type guys, i.e. they specialize in bathroom and kitchen renovations, or other "home improvement" jobs that one guy can do by himself or maybe with a helper.
The real tradesmen (plumbers, electricians, etc.) will often start their own businesses, especially once they get to know and be known by the local contractors, and end up doing bigger new construction jobs with dozens of employees. The comparable white-collar version of this would be the experienced developer or marketer who starts their own consultancy or agency.
I think it would be more rare to see a true "start up" in the blue collar world. Most of their work is regulated by code and there isn't as much room to compete on innovation, you have to compete on reputation and experience and that can't be substituted by VC money.
When I see stories like this all I can think of is that rich people must really hate paying their blue collar workers market value and want to flood the market to lower their wages and bargaining ability. Especially when I hear how hard it is to actually get a proper blue collar job (that isn't just a manual labor with a bit of carpentry job paying below a living wage) and be apprenticed in it from my blue collar friends.
Ding ding!
I mean, good? We need more tradespeople than we do office workers - and we need everyone in both fields to be paid substantially more than they presently earn, which will only come about through new business creation, something tradespeople dominate. Software engineers won’t power the green energy transformation so much as skilled electricians, architects, contractors, and builders. More finance people won’t replace aging and inefficient infrastructure so much as more road workers, pipe fitters, plumbers, and wastewater engineers.
I think the current (over)hype around LLMs replacing jobs wholesale is an excellent catalyst for this shift, but I also acknowledge that the pendulum was already naturally swinging that way after decades of over-prioritizing white collar work as the only means of joining the shrinking middle class.
Agreed. If this also raises the social status of blue collar work / workers - I mean that someone with a college degree won't feel ashamed to work in the trades, or that, say, a diesel mechanic wouldn't feel out of place at a book club - this will also be a positive development.
This doesn’t raise the status of blue collar workers because there are only so many plumbing jobs out there.
Don’t get me wrong - The trades are good, and were simply not “sexy” for a long while.
There was a reason people wanted their kids to do white collar work. Trades are dependent on economic cycles, and work can dry up. It’s also manual labor, which takes a toll on you physically.
In the end - neither white collar nor blue collar matter much, since neither guarantee a retirement anymore. The AI job apocalypse (if it happens) will be taking out the last life boat left standing.
We had manufacturing to move people from agrarian work to middle class life. That’s gone - automation has gotten to the point of lights out manufacturing. This has left only services.
Ps: I doubt AI will actually be the powerhouse it is being hailed as. There is a different between an MVP and having to maintain technical debt.
Agreed. If you have to work for a living, you’re part of the same class as everyone else - and just as capable of intelligence, empathy, and accomplishment. Metaphorical collar colors are irrelevant.
What makes you think we need more trades people?
Whst makes you think we don't?
Because I'm from working class, rust belt and ive seen the reality the state of America blue collar, not just the "the guy who installed my TV said he owns his own business and makes almost as much as me working in software" fantasy.
I've also had a front row seat to "just learn JavaScript" go from great career advice to joke in the span of time it'd take you to finish a trade apprenticeship.
Blue collar jobs are only going to be the go-to for as long as the labor supply is lower than the commercial demand, which I doubt will be long (if this is even the case now). It takes a non-neglible amount of time to train (or certify) for these jobs in much of the western world, which means that any bump in demand is met with a significant lag in supply. Once that supply catches up, the momentum of people saying "bro just go to trade school instead of college, plumbers/electricians/welders/dirt farmers make $100k" is going to dump thousands and thousands of juniors into a market that will very quickly oversaturate. We are witnessing this at an accelerated rate with software development and other tech jobs, largely due to extreme external factors (high interest rates limiting VC cash flow, Trump's hostile domestic economic policies[0], demonstrable downward pressure on employment mobility and wage suppression from big tech[1]).
The american "middle class" is still shrinking, but now it's shrinking faster than ever before, largely because the capital class wants more money, and there is one more stone to bleed. Creating a market of blue collar professionals who will be blackballed from white collar markets due to their educational and work histories (in tandem with the desired outcome of using AI workloads for these jobs in lieu of people) will raise the commercial value of these white collar services, while gatekeeping their entry and stagnating/lowering their compensation. The ladder is being set on fire.
0. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44180533 1. https://equitablegrowth.org/aftermath-wage-collusion-silicon...
"AI will kill white collar, those people should just go into trades, they can become plumbers". Great idea, except that's not how supply/demand works. AI didn't create the need for more toilets.
"AI didn't create the need for more toilets."
It does generate a lot of shit...
Queuing Gattaca dystopian future…
Did anyone RTFA. The damn sub head literally contradicts the title as clickbait and admits it’s false.
This is another recycled version of the "college is a scam" trope that comes around during every recession. I first experienced it firsthand when I graduated smack dab in the middle of the Great Recession of 2008-09. Those who had majored in the so-called "basket weaving" disciplines were doomed, while those in "job-ready" disciplines like comp sci, accounting and finance were also doomed, but marginally less so as they'd bounce back when the S&P500 did.
It's far too simple to say "train to be a plumber" or HVAC, construction, or auto mechanic or whatever people latch on to as "future-proof / recession-proof". The reluctance to take these jobs is not the resistance to doing manual labour, but that lifetime income is limited unless you're the boss.
As with any role in a broadly non-unionized labour market, you only make proper money if you incorporate, strike deals of your own, hire people and pay yourself multiples more than the labour. Otherwise, your time, labour and frankly, bodily integrity is at the mercy of whoever signs your paychecks. And just like every other industry, only a small proportion of workers are cut out to be biz dev or people managers, and as a boss, you need to be able to do both.
Demand for electricians or mechanics will not grow proportionately with growth in electrician training programs, any more than SW Eng jobs did with the growth of bootcamps in the 2010s. The difference was that coding jobs were often paid for on the back of venture capital, or on the back of a giant, profitable corporation. The trades are not like that, you can't be paid more than what the company brings in revenue-wise.
Similar story here, learned to program during the dotcom bust. Everyone including Scott Adams was obsessed with tech being a dead end because of offshoring to India. Starting in mid-00's with no education at 18, I've never had to worry about money or a job. Maybe offshoring made a difference but do I care? Especially early on, companies were thrilled to find someone local who wanted to and was able to code. Just like they're blown away recently by someone who can work without ChatGPT and isn't in the field because mommy made them do it. It's incredible how little things change. But sure, go become plumber, lord knows I need one sometimes.
We overcorrected toward white collar work. Now it’s time for us to overcorrect toward blue collar work.
I wonder what effects this will have in the long run, as people attuned to white-collar labor and culture begin to assume jobs usually held by people who aren’t...
I generally don’t believe in Panacea’s, and if these jobs were so great and the solution to all our problems, why is it when we live in a country where a large percentage of folks are rural or otherwise have blue collar values, there not pursuing them?
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying all blue collar jobs are bad, many are fantastic! But like all things, it’s likely a pyramid. Just like a lot of software engineering jobs are shitty.
If it is offered as a panacea, then the glut of applicants will just drive down wages.
The safest are the licensed professions because numbers of new entrants are regulated by cartel and people won't be able to let go of the demand because again, regulations. Simply put, safest jobs will be red-taped sinecures.
so what happens when blue collar jobs get saturated?
looking forward to the Learn2Plumb bootcamps on HN
all these type articles do is manufacture consent for layoffs
Something that bugs me about all these articles. It’s all bullshit. Almost any future is possible at this point and the data can be analyzed in almost any way. Could be AI, could be the economy, could be vibes. You’ll just get stupider reading all this shit.
A huge problem of articles in general is that they are made to entertain you rather than inform you because of ad-driven incentives. It's indeed all bullshit.
wait till robots come for their jobs !
I am UX Researcher, Designer and UI Developer. Up until a week ago (company gave permission to use GPT) per some tests I did (personally) with GPT i thought indeed it can do my job yet as of today and using GPT 5...
Logo & Graphic Creation....
- Does this the best so far, but asking it to edit a graphic it created / you liked it doesn't always do what you asked. So, playing with GPT to get it right vs. taking what it initially gave you (same as going to a stock photo site and finding graphics to manipulate) and opening Photoshop is still same amount of time. So here GPT is just another stock photo site like resource yet can take TIME to generate. Is it pulling from a stock site anyway?
- Web Design
On your first attempt to ask it to create a solid web design it works good yet asking it to make edits to it forget lol. It will go and create totally new design and at times on the first attempt it chooses to create a design with a width of 800px (cutting off the left and right sides of the full design).
Front-End Coding...
It does not host images and or provide an entire zip of a website it coded. My Front-End skills are still needed until it provides a zip and handles images properly!
UX Research...
These skills I feel are safest from AI as it requires interfacing with users!