Blue-collar jobs are gaining popularity as AI threatens office work
nbcnews.com
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The business is not broken and does not need "fixing."
Welcome to tech, that’s what we do here.
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.
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.
Build less charge more applies to practically everything.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It's like the economic version of "who will watch the watchers"?
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.
"One time a new tech succeeded despite skepticism, therefore all new tech will succeed despite skepticism"
And then theres the whole concept of what currency actually is.
Thank you, I'm glad someone understood my comment at least.
If a consensus arrives in 5 years and we decided that yes, LLMs can in fact reason, reasonning would be an emerging capacity, and that would be incredibly interesting.
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.
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.
You take care of the checkboxes mate
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.
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.
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.
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
The real secular arc here predating the GenAI rush has been the decreasing ROI of a generic college degree.
"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."
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.
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.
I will be absolutely shocked if there is any real attempt to regulate AI adoption. Capitalists gotta capital.
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.
Unfortunately I don’t think meritocracy and protectionism make for good roommates inside white collar brains.
See here for the relevant study: https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-echochambers-27074746
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
> protecting the jobs of Illinois’ thousands of qualified behavioral health providers
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.
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!
fixed it for you
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
Sidenote, re "just as capable of... empathy": one of the more interesting things I've recently learned from raising a small human is the extent to which empathy must be taught. It's changed my view of the world a bit, because it's clear how many people haven't been, and so (now, as adults) genuinely aren't capable of it.
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.
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.
looking forward to the Learn2Plumb bootcamps on HN
all these type articles do is manufacture consent for layoffs
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...
It does generate a lot of shit...
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!
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.