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A.I. companies are recruiting electricians and carpenters by the thousands

nytimes.com

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Re: A.I. companies are recruiting electricians and carpenters by the thousands

#231

Post by anigbrowl »

goatlover wrote: post #78
goodpoint wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For the next 6 months until they get all replaced by robots

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 time, and generally owners don't usually want the building completely gutted and rebuilt from scratch. But it's not that hard. New construction is relatively straightforward. The biggest challenges for construction robots will be handling dust/debris (25% of construction work is cleaning things up) and maintaining health and safety (of the robots themselves; self-preservation is a skill that has to be learned).

That said I don't think you'll see this with the current generation of humanoid robots. A lot of the design assumptions seem almost comically wrong to me.

Re: A.I. companies are recruiting electricians and carpenters by the thousands

#232

Post by SirHackalot »

asats wrote: post #224
nekusar wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish I could follow people on HN. Because this is worth a follow: "For the Epsteinth time, class unity is only for the upper classes"

[flagged]

Harrumph

I haven’t been on Reddit in ages, if that helps :)

Re: A.I. companies are recruiting electricians and carpenters by the thousands

#233

Post by therein »

SirHackalot wrote: post #232
asats wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Harrumph I haven’t been on Reddit in ages, if that helps :)

Reddit: Come because we made sure you can't see the comments without logging in, leave because it sucks.

Re: A.I. companies are recruiting electricians and carpenters by the thousands

#234

Post by saturn8601 »

bluGill wrote: post #202
saturn8601 wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Factory workers maybe but all processes have to be redesigned with design for robotic automation in mind. That will displace a lot of people and they will naturally go into the trades since the skills translate more easily so while I agree they wont be replaced there may be downward pricing pressure. I hear China is doing a lot of this already to stave off their upcoming demographic collapse. I haven't seen raw detai…

“Every time you ask for another dollar in wages, a thousand more robots start looking more practical.” -Roger B. Smith (GM CEO in the 1980s). Factories have been automating for decades. Last factory tour I took they said in 1950 this plant had over 2000 employees working, now (2019) about 200. Then he pointed to the laser cutter which alone replaced 150 workers with just 2. This factory is not considered very automat…

Yes I am very familiar with auto automation. They are amazing. Tesla went so overboard that maybe the ROI isn't even there for some processes (installing wheels on a car by industrial robot? They repeated the mistakes GM made in the 70s and 80s with being too early and robots being ripped out and left in the parking lots.

Already products are designed for robotic automation: reduce fasteners, make a single piece do more, make sure a blind one armed dumb person can put the thing together(thats basically the industrial single arm robots you have in factories today).

Still maybe this time is different...but to be fair I put the caveat that you must design the product from the ground up for this new kind of potential automation. (I was talking about the new bipedal vision robots not the old school industrial robot arms) What that looks like? Well the Chinese are probably cooking something up for sure and hopefully somewhere in the US its happening as well.

Re: A.I. companies are recruiting electricians and carpenters by the thousands

#235

Post by paxys »

cmiles8 wrote: post #32

The same thing happened with the oil sands boom 15 years ago. Industrial sites were losing skilled trades people left and right as they went up north to make 2-3x their salary. Then that bubble popped and these folks were tossed onto the street before they could blink. By all means go make money if the opportunity presents itself. I love to see well compensated trades. But be under no illusions that when the bubble p…

What will happen if the bubble bursts? It’s not like homes and businesses won’t need plumbers and electricians anymore. If you have the opportunity to make a lot more money for the next few years (maybe indefinitely) and in the worst case go back to what you were doing before, why wouldn’t you take it?

Re: A.I. companies are recruiting electricians and carpenters by the thousands

#236

Post by unsupp0rted »

loloquwowndueo wrote: post #123
unsupp0rted wrote: post #87

[flagged]

USA is not building anything. Private companies are. And unlike regular infrastructure projects (housing, transportation, energy) this won’t really benefit the public at large when it’s done. It’ll just enable companies to churn out more slop, faster, and reel us further in. Or to put it another way, a semiconductor, car or airplane factory wouldn’t really count as “infrastructure”, would they?

The USA is a capitalist republic. Private companies (i.e. "the market") is how infrastructure largely gets built, on the assumption that markets are an efficient way to allocate resources.

This doesn't always work, but the idea is in the long term it works better than the alternatives.

Re: A.I. companies are recruiting electricians and carpenters by the thousands

#237

Post by quickthrowman »

tokai wrote: post #92
quickthrowman wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is zero wood in a data center (or commercial building in general) excluding doors, millwork, and fire-rated plywood for mounting equipment on. It’s simply not allowed. Data center are tip-up warehouses with walls made of reinforced concrete, metal bar joists, metal columns, and metal roofs. Any interior wall framing is made of steel.

Zero wood except all the things that are made of wood, got it.

All of that stuff is probably 0.01% of the building, by volume/weight/cost/labor or any metric you care to choose. The structure itself has zero wood in it.

Trim, cabinets, and doors can all be removed from a building and it will remain standing. If you remove all of the wood from a stick-built house there is virtually nothing left.

Re: A.I. companies are recruiting electricians and carpenters by the thousands

#238

Post by axus »

tedmiston wrote: post #187
bespokedevelopr wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I applied for an apprenticeship several years ago when I was testing the waters to rotate out of tech after covid. Tested into the highest percentile, had previous high voltage experience with OEMs, a mech eng degree, still ended up like 200 people deep in the queue. That was the end of that interest. You basically have to be friends or family with someone to get into IBEW.

this is a bizarre timeline of reality where an ME degree gets you waitlisted for an electrician apprenticeship

"A Soviet engineer needs some plumbing done in his apartment..."

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47487885

Re: A.I. companies are recruiting electricians and carpenters by the thousands

#239

Post by webstrand »

nekusar wrote: post #222
SirHackalot wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

I wish I could follow people on HN. Because this is worth a follow: "For the Epsteinth time, class unity is only for the upper classes"

You're in luck https://hnrss.org/threads?id=SirHackalot>

Re: A.I. companies are recruiting electricians and carpenters by the thousands

#240

Post by jongjong »

I think that by the time AI can fully automate software engineering, it will be able to fully automate physical electrical work.

The challenge in both cases is all the invisible, hard-to-describe stuff that people are doing which business people take for granted.

Business people don't consider "minimizing complexity" to be something software engineers do, but it's literally the most important part of the job for any large complex project and it's almost impossible to measure. Even humans are pretty bad at it but at least there is a limit. With AI, there is no awareness of this and more complexity means more tokens to sell today and in the future to maintain so there is a perverse incentive and no guardrails.

Also, software engineers make a lot of decisions based on human factors and factors that are unique to the company/project.

For electricians, the part which AI struggles to automate is robotics and stuff like travelling to the job location, ensuring the right cables are available, identifying the right port to plug the cables into, drilling holes if necessary, climbing into the ceiling, pulling rolls of cables along the ceiling or wall with appropriate attachments, setting up the electrical boxes.

I think in the near future, all manual jobs will be replaced by a combination of specialist robots and generalist "human minders"; a minder will be transferrable across any industry and the entire job will be exception handling any unexpected issues which the engineers didn't yet train or program into the specialist robots.

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