Comment by stephen_cagle | Hacker News Reader

Comment by stephen_cagle | Hacker News Reader

I'm somewhat skeptical of this "enter the trades" movement. Actually, I am more skeptical of that statement than I am of LLM's replacing white collar work in general. I think parts of coding are being replaced quickly because they are the parts that don't require discernment. Trades likely contain just as many automatable and just as many discernment parts as white collar work. At this moment in history, the automatable parts are being automated in the knowledge based world. People think the physical world is somehow different, but with world models (along the full spectrum of what that means) the physical world will be just as trainable as the knowledge based world.

tldr; Just like knowledge work, most trade stuff is probably mostly repeated (i.e. very trainable) task with a small amount of taste and discernment applied. The repeated will be trainable, the discernment may be trainable. I don't think the physical world is necessarily any safer than the knowledge world.

The difference is the physical aspect of the trades. The design for wiring can be (and already has been) automated, but you physically need an electrician on site to pull the wires. So I can see a hollowing out of the engineers, but not the actual electricians.

That being said, the absolute focus on trades from the fed right now just reeks of the wild pendulum swing. It used to be 'go to college to get a good job' then we had too many college grads. In ten years we'll have a glut of people trained in the trades with no prospects.

It just keeps swinging back and forth and somehow Joe Regularworker keeps losing.

Have you seen what Unitree G1 can already do? I see the writing on the walls for going onsite and pulling wires.

Indeed. If you squint a little, it kind of looks like the machines are trying to shift to a world where we are just meat puppets to do the tricky stuff there aren't robotics for (yet). :(

Or humans are just the "sex organs" that work to bring about the artificial life-forms that come next.

Cory Doctorow's "The Reverse-Centaur’s Guide to Criticizing AI" [1] agrees with you:

"<...> a reverse centaur is machine head on a human body, a person who is serving as a squishy meat appendage for an uncaring machine."

[1] https://doctorow.medium.com/https-pluralistic-net-2025-12-05...

Yeah, things change. What do you propose to do about that? The only people who lose are the ones who can't accept that they may need to change careers to make more money.

Robots are expensive, software is not. I can instantly duplicate software 1 million times and run it in parallel, I can't just produce 1 million robots. Physical world is always harder.

Even if we get robots who can, say, build roads start to end, there is still a HUGE gap between that and it actually being used. There is a hard floor, too. Robots are made of physical things, physical things have scarcity, and there's no way around that to our knowledge. Even if you can build the robot for 1 cent, the material cost will still exist.

> Robots are expensive

People are not, though, and all the folks who are no longer necessary in knowledge work are available for physical work.

Dark thoughts... Imagine a future where most human beings are just overseered by an LLM and we are just wearing AR work glasses. Barely aware of what (physical) work we are doing as we overlay our hands within the projections of our AR glasses. Every task is decomposed into a set of small physical steps, you don't even think about what you are trying to actually accomplish, just follow the steps one at a time. I wonder if an entire fast food restaurant could be run in this fashion? No managers, no shift supervisors, just a skeleton crew doing one step of a task at a time.

Why have fast food restaurants at all at that point? Just have everyone eat the same mass-produced, nutritionally-optimized substance, and use the AR vision to superimpose pretty pictures over that food. Varied meals are for the rich.

Hasn't the US already minimised the cost of all the construction work that are "the parts that don't require discernment" to minimum wage who-cares-if-they're-documented-or-not day workers?

Seems the answer is no, the average wage is about $25/hr depending on region.

Cool, I can make that working at Walmart many places nowadays.

The average for Walmart is $18.25.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com