Everyone seems to forget that if everyone followed the “AI-proof career” advice to become a plumber, electrician or carpenter - then there’d be so many of them that the pay would go down considerably
The demand will also drop through the floor because the people who previously had the well-paying white collar jobs who are a large amount of the non-corporate customers for trades people will be gone, so they can no longer afford to hire you. The corporate customers will have far less need for facilities other than data centers because they won't have nearly as many meat employees to house, so the demand craters there too.
And some amount of the other people fleeing to the trades will have taken up your specific trade, and why would they pay someone to do something they can do themselves.
So you'll have massively increased labor supply as everyone flees to these "AI safe" jobs and massively decreased demand due to a flattened low-wage economy where almost everyone is trying to scrape by on a trades job.
If the AI labor disruption is big enough to cause a serious problem for all knowledge workers, I don't see how it doesn't take everything else down with it. The entire economy as we know it just spirals into chaos leading to, probably, violent revolution.
The dynamics of blue collar employment would obviously be changed as a second order effect of white collar worker displacement
The value of human labor is going to the price of electricity and raw materials outside of a few, small realms and people are not ready for that fact.
These can be trucked or flown into place.
Factory built simplifies full trade critical path, with pipeline schedule of custom variations moving through to be wired, plumbed, built out and finished.
Also opportunity for automation streamlining.
Simpler offerings of that market look like: https://modularwa.com.au/
That's why I differentiated between robots working on new construction sites, where I do think that a 15-20 year timeline is entirely feasible (not necessarily desirable, but feasible). That's an entirely different task than renovations in an existing building, which is much *much* harder even for humans.
Also note that there's another way of thinking about where technology will take housebuilding that already exists: more factory-assembled modular cosntruction. That's less popular in the USA, with its focus on single family "unique" homes, but is taking off elsewhere and is already highly automated.
For wiring/plumbing/ducting runs ... not so much.
Also the COVID part is a false analogy / non sequitur. COVID was expected to end. Surviving COVID doesn't mean the economy can survive permanent shocks.
Not permanently. And, as sibling pointed, not at all in lots of areas.
That is pretty obvious and mostly correct idea. I don't understand why people who have even a little bit of common sense about how the economy works thinks that mass layoffs of programmers or office workers will destroy the economy.
I mean then they will start to sell their homes and situation for those who can buy them cheaply and renovate will become even better, no?