[CapitalistCartr]

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.

[Uehreka]

> 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.

[teeray]

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.

[moltar]

But you need to realize that both professions aren’t valued the same everywhere.

In my childhood in the Soviet Union “plumber” was what parents scared their kids with “if you don’t study, you’ll become a plumber”. And that profession was extremely undesirable and didn’t pay well.

Also in many SEA countries both professions aren’t paid well.

I think in North America it’s different because it’s highly regulated and barrier for entry is high.

[Uehreka]

I think a lot of people in America talk about plumbers as this sort of “aspirational blue-collar job” because they forget how dirty it is. Like, the usual boomer framing is to talk about how you know a guy who makes $100K as a plumber, mumble something about unions and then go “100K to fix sinks sure sounds nice”.

What that framing misses is that a lot of plumbers have to fix situations where a sewer line ruptured and someone’s basement is covered in shit. Or like, you get called in because someone’s garbage disposal is clogged with something nasty, and the person won’t tell you what it is. Plumbers definitely should get paid a lot for what they do, though whether that’s actual true varies.

[mothballed]

This is why being a septic guy seems like a good gig. I paid my septic guy $10k for one day's labor, with about $4k in materials to come in with a massive excavator and one helper.

I'm sure the cost of his excavator ran into ~$1k of wear/depreciation over that day but two men basically cleared $5k in a combined 20 man hours.

If you can deal with poop you can make a lot of money. Doesn't seem to be much interest in that trade either, no one thinks to become a septic installer.

[Tadpole9181]

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.

That why we call it a house of cards.

[nopinsight]

Humans being who they are, there's still a tremendous amount of work to do in this world (and beyond).

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.

[dzink]

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.

[shit_game]

More tradespeople don't make more housing, capital and legislation do. Both capital and legislators (a disturbing number of whom are either landlords or realestate tycoons) are perversely incentivised to keep housing supplies low because that creates a market in which housing appreciates and generates more income than a market in which housing is plentiful.

[tsunamifury]

This isn’t just housing. After Covid the entire market for everything complex or needed shifted to demand side.

Build less charge more applies to practically everything.

[Uehreka]

People need to stop with this whole “more people on $job means more of $product” thing. I know that’s what they teach in freshmen economics, but it’s almost never true in reality.

[dzink]

The reality is that if you have a skill and there are no jobs, if the skill is something you can practice on your own as a freelancer or entrepreneur, you will do it. And if your skill allows you to make something that disproportionately earns a lot of money, like housing, you will see people doing it. I come from the future - Eastern Europe, a place that endured extreme hyperinflation, poverty, and started generating growth again not long ago.

[pllbnk]

Also, a lot of the blue collar income comes from white collar people whose purchasing power is the main factor how much they can be charged.

[insane_dreamer]

Not only that, but enough people need to be earning money outside of the trades to be able to afford to pay for the services of those in the trades.

It's like the economic version of "who will watch the watchers"?

[frankdorr35]

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_am_proteus]

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."

[idkwhattocallme]

But it is broken. There is a shortage of every type of trades worker. Sure it's been great for existing trade folks because there are plenty of jobs and the pay is great more demand than supply. But the lack of supply has meant that it's too expensive to build/fix stuff. If you're in the US look around. It looks like we literally stopped building in the 1950s. Every renovation/building project is multi-year. Why? The lack of plentiful skilled trades people is one of the reasons the US building and infrastructure are deteriorating.

[techpineapple]

> The business is not broken and does not need "fixing."

Welcome to tech, that’s what we do here.

[Rover222]

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.

[JALTU]

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!

[orwin]

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.

[quickthrowman]

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.

[tharmas]

Yes, totally agree. LLMs are largely pattern recognition. They cant reason.

[orwin]

That's arguably the most interesting about the discussion on LLMs. Can't they reason? If they do, reason is an emerging fonction. 2 years ago, before inference was truly added to LLMs,a Honk Kong university paper wrote that ChatGPT 3.5 reasoning was correct 64% of the time on a specific task (you asked it to make the same reasonning 100 time, 36% of the time it would be wrong for no reason). I'd like to see how modern LLMs with added inference matrices and a lot of helpers before the actual transformers perform on this test.

If a consensus arrives in 5 years and we decided that yes, LLMs can in fact reason, reasonning would be an emerging capacity, and that would be incredibly interesting.

[tsunamifury]

“The internet is a passing fad”

[quickthrowman]

I don’t think LLMs have zero applications, I just haven’t found any for my specific use cases. If someone is able to figure out a way for LLMs to interpret construction drawings, it would be immensely useful, I’d be able to price substantially more work.

[sleepyguy]

I think back to a 1991-1992 when someone stood over my shoulder watching and telling me what a waste of time it was and who they hell is ever going to use it :)). I remind them from time to time and we have a good laugh.

[do_not_redeem]

Ah yes, the same quote often used by cryptocurrency enthusiasts.

"One time a new tech succeeded despite skepticism, therefore all new tech will succeed despite skepticism"

[tharmas]

Distributed ledger/blockchain is an interesting idea but far too energy intensive to be of practical use.

And then theres the whole concept of what currency actually is.

[eiishiiiou]

"[Distributed ledger/blockchain] | [LLM] is an interesting idea but far too energy intensive to be of practical use."

[mothballed]

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.

[pragmatic]

What could go wrong!

[mothballed]

Doesn't seem like much. We eliminated electrical (and other) inspections and paperwork 20+ years ago and none of the paranoid delusions of the nay-sayers came true.

[getnormality]

All else equal it seems healthier for society to have a strong professional electrician trade, but if an area is struggling to have that, it definitely seems better to have the DIY knowledge publicly available. Somebody has to keep the electrical working!