> If you had an expert looking over your shoulder and telling you what to do, I expect most of you could do most of the work of an electrician … In fact, that's the bulk of how electricians learn their trade: through apprenticeship. People wearing glasses with built-in cameras, connected to today's strongest AIs could already do a lot with a bit of scaffolding.

Apprentices have their work directly checked by the person supervising them, who is also ultimately personally responsible for the results.

I am a programmer but also like to work with my hands—I’ve done some amount of "real" electrical, plumbing, carpentry, light construction, mechanical, and landscaping work. To me, this line of thinking overall falls into a category of "things computer programmers believe about other kinds of jobs," that I see fairly often on HN. It’s key to the whole argument here but kind of papered over with an unvalidated assumption it’d probably already work with today’s AI.

Anyone who has followed a DIY YouTube video more than a few times has encountered situations where having muscle memory and proprioceptive experience with actually manipulating the tools and objects you’re working with would significantly reduce the chance you mess it up. How tight is too tight? Am I going to shear this bolt head off? Is this saw blade getting dull and going to hurt me? Even the best guides and teachers don’t cover the combinatoric ways things can frequently go wrong–it’s accumulated knowledge in the heads and hands of people who don’t blog about it so it can be slurped into training data.

I think there’s an enormous chasm between "can AI provide reasonably correct guidance for an inexperienced person along a happy path to accomplish basic physical tasks" and "I no longer need to hire an electrician because AI guides me through every step."