291–300 of 436 posts
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There's sort of no winning here! AI unemploys middle-class workers: AI is stealing jobs from the middle class! AI employs unionized middle-class workers: AI is stealing cheap labor from the rest of us!
The employment is temporary, what follows a net negative, is the idea. And "AI" as a concept has has no agency. This is all about humans who seek to further concentrate wealth.
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> these also aren't professions that ... will get automated away in the long term sure they will, all it takes is automating running wire and making connections. when the cost is low enough to do so, it will happen. drones are already used to somewhat automate line inspection, etc. imo, there are plenty of companies attempting to automate traditional trade jobs, and increasing automation for knowledge roles in those…
It doesn't sound to me like you've pulled much wire. I'm sure there will be a point in time when that sort of thing can be automated, but it's at least an order of magnitude more difficult a problem than driving a car.
Can't imagine where I'd even start with automating the work of an electrician. Even something as basic as robots grabbing regular objects is intractable right now, much less handling wire.
You'd have to have a project of massive scale that's designed specifically to aid automation and then have a fairly straightforward robot doing the work.
"Send a robot to arbitrary location X and do arbitrary electrician job Z" is fantasy land.
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It doesn't sound to me like you've pulled much wire. I'm sure there will be a point in time when that sort of thing can be automated, but it's at least an order of magnitude more difficult a problem than driving a car.
I'd say it's at least two. Driving a car is fairly straightforward, the problems are all tractable. Can't imagine where I'd even start with automating the work of an electrician. Even something as basic as robots grabbing regular objects is intractable right now, much less handling wire. You'd have to have a project of massive scale that's designed specifically to aid automation and then have a fairly straightforward…
If datacenter demand doesn't evaporate, mega scale datacenters sound like the most probable candidates for this.
It's nice to hear tradespeople getting paid well with lots of work. I'm happy for them :-)
Most electricians will make more than the average sysadmin, senior developer or network engineer here.
The amount of people getting into trades over the past decade has dropped drastically. There is no reason a fully qualified, even residential electrician cannot make 200k a year. Electricians aren't even the highest paid trade, plumbers are.
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It doesn't sound to me like you've pulled much wire. I'm sure there will be a point in time when that sort of thing can be automated, but it's at least an order of magnitude more difficult a problem than driving a car.
I'd say it's at least two. Driving a car is fairly straightforward, the problems are all tractable. Can't imagine where I'd even start with automating the work of an electrician. Even something as basic as robots grabbing regular objects is intractable right now, much less handling wire. You'd have to have a project of massive scale that's designed specifically to aid automation and then have a fairly straightforward…
installation systems are currently made for humans, so one has to do some fantasizing to see a future where installs can be done completely by non-human agents or by automated orchestration of low skill human agents.
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> While we're at it, how much should small bathroom, 2 week renovation cost? $100,000 in labour? Obviously much more than 2 weeks worth of work at a commercial job, since that's the worst possible kind of work you could ever offer any tradesman. Maybe 8x the hourly rate would be fair since it's intermittent work with generally horrible customers? It's been interesting to watch the IT/engineering classes all of a sudd…
> For any electricians/plumbers/etc. out there? Go get yours. When the shoe was on the other foot you were mocked and told to switch careers, lowballed on horrible residential projects, told to skill up and get better if you wanted to get paid more, there was no future in the trades, etc. Make hay while the sun shines and ignore the bleating. yeah instead they did the smart thing and they got together and passed prot…
I don't really think electricians have to worry about that. There may be the some shops that employ immigrants as helpers, but most electricians have spent at least several years getting their hours, building their kit and learning the NEC + local codes. It's hard to picture companies importing labor and training them for so long.
I would be very careful about basing your career decsions based on this trend. The data center build out will always be very boom and bust, which would really suck to work in. One year you would be making 300k working on dataceters and the next you would make 30k because thousands of electricians are now competing to build a few single family homes.
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Doubt we'll see electricians, plumbers or carpenters being replaced anytime soon.
I think you'll be surprised about that. I'm not in the robotics field (though perhaps I should be) but at an earlier stage in life I spent several years on remodelling and building houses - as in swinging a hammer, not singing deeds and checks. Repair/remodeling is challenging because you need (approximate) knowledge of construction techniques from across a 150 year timespan, buildings settle and change shape over ti…
It all comes down to robots being unable to hold and operate anything in 3d space, much less precision tooling in arbitrary environments, which is basically what construction is. Everything in construction needs extensive planning, then to be done in the exact right order, with almost perfect precision.
The idea that you could tell a robot how you want a house remodeled and that it'd be able to go from there to actually do it is frankly asinine.
We don't have robots at all, much less humanoid ones, not even doing comparatively trivial, fixed tasks like laundry or the dishes, and you think we're going to have them manage the infinitely complex task of remodeling a house? Your mental model of robotics is completely wrong.
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just don't forget these are temporary, eventually there will be "enough" data centers, and none of these jobs will exist, so if you are planning a 20 year + career, don't count on this being the norm.
Nah. If USA returns to its senses we are going to need tons of tradespeople to build all the stuff we need for the billion Americans.