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Comment by lambdaone | Hacker News Reader

This is a romantic and very appealing idea that flies in the face of reality. The market for skilled trade workers like plumbers, electricians, landscapers and so on is more or less in equilibrium, and the demand side of it is relatively inelastic. Dumping hundreds of millions of new workers into these trades will not increase demand sufficiently to let anyone earn a viable living from them.

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There is nothing that can absorb millions of new workers. If AI destroys jobs to that degree pitchfork manufacturers will be the only ones left in business.

Where I live at least right now it is quite hard to find contractors for anything and many are close to retirement age and have a hard time finding replacements.

There's also the thing where trade work is in the process of pricing itself out of what normal folks are willing to afford. Combined with Youtube tutorials and AI help that is getting better, it wouldn't surprise me if more and more people would just decide to do all this stuff themselves at a fraction of the cost.

Yeah, I feel DIY is definitely on an upswing. There's surprisingly decent info, tools and parts for cheap to be found. And materials are getting simpler to work with.

There are still things that will remain difficult (or illegal) in domestic settings for DIY, of course, but that's no model for full employment.

I haven't got any experience with them but there's even vendors for house assembly kits that cost a fraction of a finished one. Imagine you idiot-proof house planning and building: just do exactly what the app says.

I wonder just how far we have to push this until we finally get the 10h work week.

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