I'm an industrial electrician. I have zero fears of being replaced by any any sort of AI. Maybe by someone younger and smarter, but I have 38 years experience. The trades are a decent living, and lots of people could do worse.
> The trades are a decent living, and lots of people could do worse.
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.
I think locality is the difference. Electricians and Plumbers are needed basically everywhere. Conversely, there’s not much of a local market for bespoke software development in random towns in the US. While, yes, there are various contractors with statewide coverage, Joe-with-a-pickup-truck who treats the neighbors right in town still wins out many times.
I can't believe nobody has brought this up, but the threat isn't even that there will be too many electricians. The threat is the question: "who is going to pay for these electricians at all?"
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.
The big upside here is that more web designers make more web sites, but more electricians and crafts people make more houses eventually (whatever is most valuable) and we can use more of that.
Same here, however with the new meta glasses or the augmented reality glasses you're going to see people with no knowledge of our field actually troubleshooting machines with technicians remotely. They will be paid a lot less than us.
I wonder who will be held at fault when the low-paid in-person troubleshooter discovers 15kV with his fingers (I do not wonder who will be killed) while his lock opens the wrong breaker.
The business is not broken and does not need "fixing."
My grandpa was a master electrician. My father was a master electrician. I am a software engineer. I am sweating. I feel like we have another 2 or 3 years and then it might be over. I will go work in the mines.
Brief anecdote: A friend hired an electrician to wire some things and he asked how the electrician's business was going. The reply was (paraphrased): We hired seven people two weeks ago, now only one is left because the rest either didn't show up, couldn't show up regularly, or couldn't focus on tasks long enough to get work done. We let them go because this is electricity. We are not going to pay for anyone's funeral!
Home electricians will always be fine. But if you work under a manager, I guarantee you some in your business will start to use AI to micromanage you if nothing is done. Hopefully I'm too negative.
I sell and run electrical work and I don’t see any good use for LLMs for what I do on a day to day basis.
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.
Maybe, but with youtube I ran the service entry, underground secondary, a multi-structure multi-panel electrical system distribution and the residential inside. I have zero electrician training.
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.
The problem with Blue-collar work under AI is that your white collar AI manager can fork itself and have infinite time to micromanage you.
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.
> 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
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.
And a long one at that. I’m sure I could do well as an electrician eventually, but there’s no way I could make it through 4+ years as an apprentice making $21/hr, and then another three as a journeyman (even if it pays double). Maybe when my house is paid off (but who’s going to hire a 50yr old apprentice?).
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.
agreed, the trades intentionally restrict who can become trained. its the reason they are called trades in the first place. restrict labor supply to pump up their own wages
Switzerland and Germany have very good systems for apprenticeships.
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.
Mentioned in the article text, but not the title, is the fact that blue collar work typically does not require a college degree. You can start getting paid immediately after high school. Contrasted with a possible alternate path of four to five years of undergrad at a third tier college paying $80k/yr and financed at an 11% APR...
The real secular arc here predating the GenAI rush has been the decreasing ROI of a generic college degree.
Another interesting thing in the article, that also isn't in the headline, is a link to Goldman Sachs' assessment of how much AI is actually threatening office work:
"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."
People are going to be surprised when the cheap humanoid robots out of China get paired with transformer models for planning and control.
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.
Blanket characterization of regulation, as malicious barriers to AI adoption, creates the perfect smoke screen to deflect discussion of the actual problems we are seeing.
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.
Most professional services already have a moat around them in that you need to be licensed in order to practice the profession; AI can’t disrupt these industries because A) after three years, the hallucination issue has not improved and B) the AI itself can’t legally perform most of the services a licensed professional is permitted to provide.
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.
AI therapy is hardly a good example of trying to erect barriers to AI adoption. I don’t think they’re trying to protect practitioners they’re trying to protect patients.
I will be absolutely shocked if there is any real attempt to regulate AI adoption. Capitalists gotta capital.
Who do you think is spending money lobbying politicians to ban this? Do you think it's a depressed patients activist group who is scared someone might try to sell them a cheap always available AI therapist?
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.
Society has multiple classes with distinct interests. It’s not just “owners versus workers.” In the U.S., the top 0.1% own about 14% of the wealth, but most of the rest is owned by the top 25% outside the top 0.1%. Within this class there is a spectrum of “ownership.” Tim Cook is technically a worker, but he has “owner” wealth. But he came into that wealth by being a worker—he never risked his own capital to start a business, nor did he inherit assets. This is especially true for knowledge work, where putative workers typically are non-fungible in ways that give them a great deal of leverage with owners.
What level of institutional and cultural acceptance, de jure or de facto, would be needed to make you feel otherwise here?
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!
Except not really, as evidenced by China hamstringing private rollout of AI tools like facial recognition or data-based surveillance and retaining those solely for the government’s use. They know that whatever issues the US is grappling with now, they’re not too far behind, and they have the added benefit of learning from our mistakes.
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.
Who are these trades going to sell their services to when a large proportion of people employed in white collar work are looking at a prospect of reduced income or loss of jobs?
The economy functioned without large numbers of office workers in the past, and there are regions of the country where this is still the case. To an extent they will sell their services to each other. To another extent they will be selling to the owners of AI (imagine an electrician building out a data center). The economic surplus will still be there - it will be larger in fact - and there will still be a need for their services. The players involved will change however.
“In the past” trades did not enjoy nearly the income levels they do now. The rise in demand for their services and corresponding raise in their compensation are linked to the wealth of the other half of the economy.
Readit News
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.
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.
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.
It's like the economic version of "who will watch the watchers"?
The business is not broken and does not need "fixing."
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.
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.
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.
You take care of the checkboxes mate
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.
Deleted Comment
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 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.
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.
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.
fixed it for you
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!
Unfortunately I don’t think meritocracy and protectionism make for good roommates inside white collar brains.
Deleted Comment
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.
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?