Even if you are a plumber and we don’t automate plumbing, you’ll have half the population displaced and switching to plumbing. Everything that isn’t automated will be over saturated.
I don't think the reason that most people don't DIY plumbing is a lack of accessible information. Any physical craft like that requires practice, so I think there's a real moat there.
There is a lot less information online about the physical trades compared to software development. Plumbers don’t post on ToiletOverflow.com all day helping each other with their little tricks and sharing tribal knowledge. Pick a random brass fitting at the hardware store and try to google its purpose; you’d be surprised by the scant detail even when yielding plenty of shopping links
Where I live, just the call out fee for a plumber would cover the cost of tools and materials with enough left over for beers afterwards. If you’re relatively handy and willing to thing things through, the main obstacle to doing all your own plumbing (again, at least where I live) is regulatory capture.
When we continue this line of thought far enough, we get to ask who's going to pay for the hardware and the electricity to run the AI that's taking all the jobs.
This is exactly the missing long-term perspective. All AI creators are focused either on the projected wins or the shiny technology, ignoring societal effects. Not that they should, they are engineers or MBAs after all, but somebody should. Somebody like us, or better somebody with better reach and better knowledge, should figure out a way to offer a future also to former clerks.
These days I find Gemini often recommends me a youtube video that's just an AI voice reading out a reddit post that was chat gpt generated full of emoji.
Will so many people switch to plumbing though ? Really depends on how old you are when you get canned (I don't think its realistic for most 40 year olds to start a plumbing career), how good you are with your hands and physical things and whether you can survive the switch psychologically; I don't see many investment bankers or software devs survive such a switch.
I'm 42, even if I was very good with my hands (which I'm not) I don't think it would have been a realistic transition; by realistic I mean survivable psychologically.
So people will not all switch to plumbing, indeed. But then to what? There's only so much need for tattoo artists and geriatric care - which your customers must also afford to pay.