[acatnamedjoe]

I see the plumber/electrician thing a lot.

But talking to my friends who do these jobs it always seems like it would be even more vulnerable to AI than programming.

Experienced electricians get paid decent wages because they have had lots of training and then have seen loads of different problems. So they intuitively know things like 'This is a 1960s house so if there's a problem with the lighting the first thing I should check is the fuse box connector, it should look like xyz, etc. Etc.'. This seems like exactly the sort of thing an LLM could do for them.

I think you could easily see a world where an electrician is someone on minimum wage with very minimal training who blindly connects wires as instructed by an AI.

I reckon the safest jobs are ones with limited reliance on knowledge and a very high level of physical skill (in environments where it's hard to get machines to operate). Bricklayers, plasterers and painter/decorators will be the big earners of the 2050s!

[revelio]

I wonder if there's enough info about how to do tradesmen's jobs online for that to happen. Programmers are at risk because we filled the internet with free training materials but many jobs aren't like that especially anything with a physical component.

[Al-Khwarizmi]

This is an interesting point. A family member of mine is what we call here a medical evaluator - not sure if it has a direct equivalent in e.g. the US and how it is called here, but those are doctors who assess the disabilities of workers who apply for a pension due to illness or accident. This involves exploring the patient and then making the decision and justifying it in a report. The latter two seem like tasks that LLMs should be able to do easily.

However, we tried a description of a fake case to see what Bing could do, and it couldn't do much. And I think the reason is that there are very detailed documents on the rules that they follow for their decisions, but these are not online - they are in a private intranet and they can't take them out of there. If Bing had access to those documents I don't think it would have much of a problem.

So maybe a way for workers to protect themselves from being replaced by AI is not uploading much information about their jobs to the Internet... I wonder if this will lead to a situation like guilds in the middle ages, treating job skills essentially as secrets.

[acjacobson]

I don't know if it is enough yet but there has been an explosion of this kind of content on Youtube over the last 10 years. For typical home repairs it seems most topics are pretty well covered.

[beachy]

The most recent electrician jobs we've had done were:

- fitting a timer into the switchboard to control the hot water cylinder. A simple job, but the sparky also had to talk to me (the client) to get us both on the same page.

- fitting an EV fast charger in the garage. Not much science, but a lot of cable running and clipping down, then the garage switchboard needed to be swapped out for a larger one that could take the required RCD. And convincing me which brand charger to go for. 2 guys working together for a couople of hours.

- fixing the range hood light (always on due to a broken switch). He spent quite some time trying to extract the broken switch, with the range hood balanced on his shoulder and wires everywhere.

In every case there was no real complexity to the job, not the sort of thing that an AI could have been helpful at at all. Just a lot of common sense, knowledge of the regulations and much skilled manual work.

I don't think AI is coming for electricians any time soon.

[acatnamedjoe]

But in all of those cases presumably someone needed to figure out what needed doing? (In your case maybe you're savvy enough that you knew what the issue was and just needed a certified person to do the work, but most clients won't be).

My argument is that it is the 'figuring out' that drives electricians wages, not really the doing part. Because while clipping down cables and extracting switches is fiddly work, I'd argue it isn't a skill with enough barrier to entry to maintain high wages (as compared to brick laying or plastering, for example, which you simply can't do to a professional level without years of practice).

So most of the value delivered by an experienced electrician is in talking to clients and identifying the correct technical solution, and is therefore pretty much analogous to the value delivered by software developers.

Therefore if we accept the logic that software developers will no longer be required (or that their value will be greatly diminished) it's hard to see how that wouldn't apply to electricians too (in the sense of being a well-paid trade over and above your average manual job).

(Btw - I DON'T think either will happen, but I just think electrician is a weird choice of example for those that do think that)

[ilaksh]

There is no reason to expect robotic technology to halt. Look at what things like Tesla or Boston Dynamics robots can do. Eventually we will see very well articulated and high strength to weight ratio robots integrated with advanced AI systems. It is definitely not going to take 25 years.

If you look at what's happening today, in 25 years it seems plausible that fully autonomous superintelligent androids with much more dexterity than humans will be fully in control of the planet.

[pbalau]

You know what a tradesman does today and an AI cannot? Get under the sink, undo that rusted bolt, route that cable in that awkward position and so on.

[drclau]

Too many people make the mistake of thinking there’s an infinite number of sinks to get under.

[ilaksh]

Advanced robots will be able to do that in less than five years. Inexpensive ones in less than 20 years.

[orsenthil]

> I reckon the safest jobs are ones

The safest jobs are ones that honest to self for the doer. He/She will be able to create value either using other humans, or machines and continue to do.

Sorry, I wanted to try "safest jobs are ones that involve politics", while those will always be present, it is not the safest and wont be many available, so changed to more abstract answer.

[WithinReason]

AI can only automate things for which a training database exists