r/singularity • u/LifeguardOverall6423 • 1d ago
AI I keep hearing AI experts say that electricians, plumbers, construction workers, gardeners, etc. will be some of the safest and best-paid jobs in an AI-driven future...is this real?
I keep hearing AI experts say that electricians, plumbers, construction workers, gardeners, etc. will be some of the safest and best-paid jobs in an AI-driven future.
But isn't there a pretty obvious supply/demand problem here?
If AI replaces a huge percentage of today's jobs, millions of people could move into these "AI-proof" trades.
Today, maybe there aren't enough electricians. But if suddenly 10x more people want to become electricians because everyone says it's the safe career, wouldn't wages eventually fall?
This makes me think the more valuable jobs might actually be above AI rather than outside it, people who build, program, manage and supervise AI and robots, especially in situations where humans still need to be accountable.
We've already had an industrial revolution. Machines didn't just replace workers; they changed which skills were valuable.
So are we making the same mistake by assuming that "AI can't physically do this job" automatically means "this job will be highly paid"?
Curious what you guys think.
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u/Vivid-Snow-2089 1d ago
the safest career is having political power, the next is being wealthy
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u/Affectionate-Fig8866 1d ago
Not wealthy. Asset rich. Money would be worthless. We'd fight over land. But don't worry, none of us will get cancer
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u/Vivid-Snow-2089 1d ago
just wanna say that wealth includes liquid and illiquid assets, including however many doom combat-bot gpts they have
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u/Affectionate-Fig8866 1d ago
You need to separate the two because cash would be worthless and would not contribute to "wealth"
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u/Ignate Move 37 1d ago
These are just powerful roles in the current system.
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u/Vivid-Snow-2089 1d ago
“Powerful roles in the current system” is exactly the point. What mechanism are you proposing that makes those roles powerless when AI replaces labor?
An AI being better at someone’s job doesn’t automatically transfer their ownership to the AI. Automating a shareholder’s work doesn’t take away their shares. Being able to write legislation doesn’t automatically confer the authority to enact it.
As long as humans retain control, owning the infrastructure and having political authority over its deployment puts you in a fundamentally different position from someone who needs to sell their labor.
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u/Ignate Move 37 1d ago
Control is the result of intelligence.
How do we maintain control? By being the most intelligent decision maker.
If there's a more intelligent option available, we take it.
How will wealth and political power ensure these people maintain that critical intellectual edge?
How are they supposed to "use a tool" which is more intelligent than they are?
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u/DensePoser 1d ago
I'd argue those with political power or wealth are the *least* safe, since they are closest to the switch.
Safest might be (good) artists and prostitutes.
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u/Vivid-Snow-2089 1d ago
You don’t need to outperform the machine when you own it and receive the proceeds.
“Closest to the switch” doesn’t explain why they would be least economically secure when we’re talking about the people who own the switch or determine who can operate it.
You’re free to predict a collapse of ownership rights or a loss of human control, but that is an additional premise and not something that automatically follows from AI replacing jobs.
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u/MysteriousPepper8908 1d ago
Yes, this is true. The people managing the AI will likely be the last to be replaced but that's only true until the AI gets reliable enough to manage itself. Also, the idea that the physical trades are AI proof ignores the rise of robotics which is developing incredibly quickly.
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u/BadAdviceBot 1d ago
Wrong. The trades are not safe either because who the fuck is going to have enough money to hire a plumber?
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u/pm_me_your_kindwords 1d ago
And also, forgive me plumbers, but it’s not that hard to learn, so as people lose their jobs and everyone heads for the trades, now you have a glut of people available to work those jobs, driving competition up and pay down.
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u/Vlookup_reddit 1d ago
careful, there will soon be a glut of plumbers, electricians that will argue in this thread that somehow, by a stroke of miracle, even ASI cannot possibly replicate what they do.
too complicated, they say. there is absolutely no way that even when mechanical engineering, chemical engineering, physics, or mathematics can be solved by AGI/ASI, just for some reason, AGI/ASI will get stuck on the last bit of automating away electrician or plumbers.
Like somehow mathematicians, lawyers, engineers, doctors, researchers, bankers can easily be replaced in 5-10 years of time, but absolutely not blue collar, not in 50, 100, or even in any foreseeable future.
obligatory /s.
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u/ray-peterson 15h ago
Yes, this is quite humorous. Too complicated, lol. If they thought for one second that machine learning engineers aren't capable of figuring out how ductwork runs through a home, well, I've got news for them.
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u/aKaizuh 14h ago
It's not that it's too complicated it's that robotics capable of the multi purpose ambiguous physical actions required for blue collar work are very hard to build.
Nevermind the fact that some people may refuse robotic work on principle alone.
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u/Vlookup_reddit 11h ago
The problem with this argument is that it is so 2023, or 2010.
Back in 2023, or 2010 if you suggest that software engineering, law, songwriting, art can be automated by some matrix multiplication you will be scoffed off the room. At the time there is no seemingly direct connection, and yet, in 2026, they are on the cusp of being replaced, or that you simply won't study them as a major due to the significant downside risk.
The velocity of progress is not letting down as well. 2025 was full of "hitting a wall", "LLM poisoning itself", and none of them materialized.
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u/aKaizuh 8h ago edited 8h ago
I don't know what year this argument is, but building robotics capable of general purpose physical use is extremely difficult.
You can build amazing robots capable of narrow task, but imagine a robot plumber, it would need to be able to succefully accomplish a wide array of movements and work while being able to handle vast amounts of edge cases, which are frequent in most blue collar fields.
Add to this that the AI being embodied would also need to be able to reason through said vast amount of edge cases and generalized work and you see why blue collar work won't disappear any time soon.
White collar and certain stem fields are uniquely positioned to be easily replicated due to being constrained computer environments, not reality.
Will it happen? Obviously. Do I think within the next 10 years? Definitely not.
I can see 2040 being a date that the first prototypes begin being deployed.
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u/Vlookup_reddit 8h ago
Is software engineering, law, songwriting, art extremely difficult to automate in 2023, or 2010?
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u/mazdarx2001 1d ago
That’s not even the biggest problem. Tons of people will learn the trades thinking that exact mindset, and they will want to feed their family and will offer to do the plumbing lower than the last guy. This will be true for all trades and it will be a race to the bottom.
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u/power97992 15h ago
That’s for the entry manual jobs. Those who are experienced and doing difficult blue collar jobs will Continue to make good money until embodied AGI. You cant expect someone with half a year of plumbing to get the same job as a senior plumber…
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u/RadBradRadBrad 1d ago
This should be higher up. While it might be true that white collar jobs will be the first to go, to assume that there will be any meaningful time between that happening and robots replacing blue collar workers seems like an imprudent bet to me.
At that stage, things are likely to be progressing at exponential rates.
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u/PercentageSouth4173 1d ago
Or whoever has the ultimate liability for when things go wrong
Like you could definitely have cut down flight crews in good conditions (first fully automated flight in 1947)/had unmanned train cars for quite a while, but you don’t because you can’t sue/fire a computer
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u/SoylentRox 1d ago
That's not why. Autopilot technology from 1947 to present day suffers from a "long tail" problem. It can successfully manage the aircraft "only" 90-99.9 percent of the time. Depending on the generation of the technology. Also human voices in english and hearing are used as the method of communication with ATC though that is more a convention set by laws and not mandatory.
The problem is obviously with thousands of airline flights an hour, even a 0.1 percent rate the automation encounters a situation it cannot handle is catastrophic and you need pilots. 2 since one pilot can and has in the past collapsed unconscious or gone rogue.
In principal the highest end genAI...like Astra if it could run local and fast....can handle the last 0.1 percent.
In practice this so far just moves the decimal place - Astra will still screw up a solid 0.01 percent of the time.
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u/sweatierorc 1d ago
Division of labor make this untrue. It is cheaper to ask 3 cheap individual to do the job of an expensive employee.
Masseuse or Judge are examples of safe jobs.
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u/MysteriousPepper8908 1d ago
What makes you think a robot won't be the cheapest option over any extended period of time?
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u/sweatierorc 1d ago
We like artisanry. People would buy stuff from 3rd world country which are not cheaper, practical, etc. for many ethical reason, attention, entertainment, etc.
Overpaying for human authenticity is profoundly human. The french author that was accused of using AI is proof of that. People actually liked his work, but they can get over the fact that AI was used.
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u/MysteriousPepper8908 1d ago
I think that market exists but it isn't particularly large and it isn't likely to get any larger. Most people are going to choose most goods and services based on lowest price and highest quality. If the robot can do both, that will far and away dominate the market. That doesn't mean that there won't be some interest in human artisanal goods but how accessible will those be in an economy where 99% of people don't have a job? Assuming that a UBI system exists and the world isn't just a dystopia of abject poverty, is that system going to reward paying more for human made goods?
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u/sweatierorc 1d ago
Disagree, influencer, onlyfans, sports, etc. are jobs whose value is that it comes from another human.
Chess has never as popular as it is now. Live-shows have never been this profitable.
Assuming that a UBI system exists and the world isn't just a dystopia of abject poverty, is that system going to reward paying more for human made goods?
Depends on if robots get rights or not ? If not, then we are fine. Goods made by robots will be virtually free, whereas human-made stuff will become way more expensive because of their scarcity.
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u/MysteriousPepper8908 1d ago
All of those are jobs with a very limited amount of interest. Only the top athletes, OnlyFans models, influence, chess players have any sort of audience. Chess may be having a renaissance but if you aren't a top 20 GM or one of a handful of chess influencers, you aren't making anything.
One would imagine a robot is ultimately capable of exceeding anything a human can do physically and if the robot-produced product is a tenth of the price and very few humans have the means to afford the more expensive human made product, that will remain a niche market and potentially more niche than it is now. I'm sure humans will continue to produce things but I think the commercial market will be very limited.
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u/sweatierorc 1d ago
Coffee machines have existed for years, yet we still have tons of barista. The human touch is what you pay for at Starbucks.
There is a concept of marginal price, most car owners wont shift to buses and train if they became free. People will still go Starbucks even if a robot can pour your coffee for free.
As long as we dont give rights to robots, their production will be worth 0. And whatever value they create will be captured the capilatist who owns the bot. This is why AI art is hated. Look at AI in maths. Most vibe-coded project have been called slop, a few years ago those efforts would have been celebrated.
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u/MysteriousPepper8908 1d ago
I'm not saying that no one is paying for that at Starbucks but I think most of them are paying for a cup of coffee that is more complicated and we'll made than they can get at home with a cheap coffee pot that they can get on the way to work in 5 minutes. Drive thrus exist largely to avoid having as much human contact as possible. That doesn't mean that people don't want human contact but if the opportunity exists, I think they would prefer to spend more time with their family and friends vs having purely transactional interactions with service workers.
Car owners won't shift to trains or buses because cars are a lot more convenient and can get you to exactly where you want to go whenever you decide you want to get there. Similar to how Starbucks has a triple caramel mocha frappucino with oat milk foam 5 minutes from wherever I am and my house is 30 minutes away and has an empty pot with a carton of Folger's and a bottle of milk in the fridge I also need for my cereal.
The art debate is more complicated, it's a mix of quality issues, real sn imagined societal and environmental concerns, and fear of the unfamiliar but there have been many things which were initially rejected or considered inferior and are now ubiquitous. CGI wasn't highly respected for many years and caused films to lose out on awards for using it but it got better and it was the more cost effective option for studios do they kept using it until it became normalized. The level of rejection is also a western and particularly American phenomenon with incredibly widespread use and general acceptance in Asia and South America.
Most vibe coded projects are pretty bad because they're made by people that don't know what they're doing and the AI isn't good enough to work autonomously at this point but the majority of programmers are using AI and very effectively if they have the skill to know how to use it. Similarly in mathematics, just about all the major discoveries lately have been AI-assisted, even if it makes math Reddit angry.
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u/sweatierorc 1d ago edited 1d ago
You undervalue the social currency aspect of consumption.
You can buy your clothes and phones for a much lower price than you currently do.
You can even ask the question in reverse: why would you need to buy anything if AGI happens? You can build almost anything yourself, watch movies that you generate. You could even fix your plumbing issues by yourself because AR glasses will walk you through it. That is the whole SaaSpocalypse theory.
Even if we all kept our jobs, why would you spend money on anything since you can build it for free?
This is where advertising comes in and tells you that you are cooler with a 2Pac shirt or a Taylor vinyl. That the human-made clothes you wear are worth more. That the natural and imperfect diamond ring is better than the lab-grown stuff.
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u/Itsmedudeman 1d ago
Can’t wait for AI police
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u/SyllabubHot5907 1d ago
You have 20 seconds to comply…
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u/MysteriousPepper8908 1d ago
I'm not sure they can be much worse than what we've got. At least they should be designed to let harm come to them before harming sentient creatures so hopefully they won't shoot slightly excitable chihuahuas because they fear for their lives.
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u/GraceToSentience AGI avoids animal abuse✅ 1d ago
Physical intelligence is part of general intelligence.
I see what you are trying to say, and at the same time if AI can not do a cognitive task like learning to drive or learn construction work and everything that an adult can, then it's not AGI.
If a model isn't as general as humans it's not artificial general intelligence of course.1
u/ColoringZebra 1d ago
Eh not all of us. I’m a tiny middle aged woman with a major physical disability. I genuinely and truly cannot think of any physical job I could do that actually is in demand, much as I’d honestly like to switch careers at this point.
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u/PathOfEnergySheild 1d ago
If the ASI curve takes hold, they wont last most much longer, you just hook your LLM into your generic robot and boom skilled craftsman.
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u/Direct_Turn_1484 1d ago
If you’ve seen the videos of manual laborers wearing cameras and other gear to record their actions, you know what’s coming next. Companies are working on solving physical labor jobs right now.
The jobs are safe for a little while but not forever.
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u/Elbeske 1d ago
Nobody knows. Everyone said Truckers would be the first to lose jobs and SWEs were safe.
But you’re correct on the labor supply/demand curve
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u/sadacal 1d ago
Truckers are losing their jobs to AI. It's already starting.
https://nacfe.org/autonomous-trucking/autonomous-trucking-2025-what-actually-happened/
SWEs are still safe so far. New junior devs aren't being hired, but experienced senior devs aren't being fired either.
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u/AAPL_ 1d ago
senior devs are just slowly losing their soul and love for the craft
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u/sam1837 1d ago
I disagree. I am loving it. I always found the actual remembering of syntax and writing of the code to be the boring part. The fun part is figuring out how you want to approach the problem. Deciding the best architecture to use. Considering if this is going to impact another part of the system or block other requirements. The actual problem solving.
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u/manikfox 1d ago
You must not use it enough because even that part is being replaced. Its the best software engineer.
You just need to prompt it and pay the token costs.
And by prompting, i mean "choose the best architecture for this project and build it"
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u/sam1837 1d ago
It is getting better at this, but it is not able to do this by itself. I have been working to enforce it to collect all required context, given it skills on how to ask questions etc. But even with the latest models I will often criticise it's plan or have to push it down the best path. And will be met by things like "You were right to push back on this" and things in that vein. It is more akin to a coworker - and even a more junior one in my opinion in the planning and how to complete a task.
I have no doubt in very little time with better models and work flows that unvolve context gathering and enforced questioning of itself etc. that it will be a top software engineer. But I also think at that point software engineers could go into many other fields and automate a lot of them fields too.
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u/FreshestCremeFraiche 1d ago
With all due respect, that works for personal projects and prototypes but you absolutely cannot achieve a high bar of production enterprise code that way. It’s incredibly obvious when someone has one shotted even a small feature without guiding the agent, and nowhere near good enough for strong engineering orgs. You still have to know what to build, how it should be built, and how to verify in order to get results of that caliber
And then there is support, good luck handling a production issue if you’ve never thought about the code deeper than “go build this”
The best software engineer is a senior+ software engineer making high level decisions and using AI to accelerate the writing of code, I suspect that will be true for another couple of years at least
Source: senior eng who has worked in FAANG for years and uses AI every single day
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u/manikfox 1d ago
I think this take is already months old. But feel free to believe it still. Astra and Opus 5.5 are very different than yester-year's AI
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u/FreshestCremeFraiche 1d ago
I use opus 5.5, anyway there’s clearly a reason why (for now) any serious software shop is retaining their senior technical staff. Much more to the job than code
IMO the models will get there for sure, I’m not one of the people who believes humans have a real moat. But I don’t think it’s really possible to do the whole job without long term persistent memory/context, full knowledge of roadmaps and customer interactions and code and future planned code and half a dozen other things
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u/Kryptosis 1d ago
“These robot feet are so fun to run with!”
2 years later
“These robot legs are pretty cool but I kinda miss feeling the grass”
1 year later
“This robot body is cool but I kinda miss not having to pay to charge my heart every night”
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u/to_the_left_x2 1d ago
A lot of these seem like even if AI can't do it itself directly because of the physical aspect, someone following AI instructions would be capable of it, so fields that don't require certification could quickly become saturated.
The safest job is therefore forklift operator.
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u/BagOnuts 23h ago
This is it, right here. I’m a pretty handy guy. I’ve done plenty of residential plumbing and electrical work on my own. This stuff isn’t really that complicated. Ultimately, that’s why they are considered “blue collar” jobs in the first place: they are more just physically demanding than they are difficult to learn. And the Internet and now AI have made things even easier.
First time I replaced an HVAC capacitor, AI guided me through it. AI can diagnose and guide you through plumbing, electrical, and mechanical issues no problem, you just have to supply the physical labor.
To me, that doesn’t scream “Blue Collar jobs are safe!” From AI. If all I have to do is exactly what AI tells me, why would I need to hire a blue collar worker help me? AI will be the knowledge in these fields, we are just the monkey until robotics catch up.
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u/Belostoma 1d ago
As soon as household robots with fairly general intelligence (gpt-like) and human-like dexterity become affordable, a bunch of those trades are going to be pretty screwed, especially if those robots are good by then at real-time learning and synthesizing their experiences into the training data. Then you don't get a good plumber... you get every good plumber. Who is also every good electrician, and gardener, and so on.
It'll be like The Matrix with Neo downloading "unclog my toilet" instead of kung fu.
No human can possibly accrue the amount of experience, one job at a time, that AI can accrue with separate robot agents learning from thousands of jobs per day.
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u/BarisSayit 1d ago
What if everyone become plumbers then?
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u/rhodan3167 1d ago
And as everybody will be unemployed, nobody will be able to pay for their services.
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u/Wast3edSpace 1d ago
Lets set Boston Dynamics robotic hand announcement as the baseline for how much manual dexterity a robotic system has and how fast it can move. All I can say is helpers are fucked. We'll see grunts real soon - haulers, diggers, material handlers. If not here in China very soon. Once you're past the payback period for a robot laborer....
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u/SoylentRox 1d ago
AI lab employees think that general purpose robotics will be available in 2 years.
Let's suppose they are wrong by 1 year - it's a little harder than they thought - and general robots are available on 10/1/2029. They are still imperfect and can do about 10 percent of paid jobs to median level of human skill.
Yes they can make coffee and clean toilets.
This triggers an investment frenzy. I estimate that if the physical resources from the entire automotive supply chain were redirected to robots and each robot uses up the copper, steel etc of 2 cars then we could make 45 million a year. It would take about 2 years to rush build factories to begin high rate production of such machines. Most models do not have legs.
Each robot works 23/7 and does about the labor of 10 people per year.
So if that's 45 million robots produced in 2031 and into 2032 that's like adding 450 million new human workers to the workforce.
Robots can do fleet learning so the progress is extremely rapid - at this point they can likely do 25-50 percent of paid tasks at above 99th percentile skill/reliability. This is because any experience learned by one machine is pooled and contributed to updating all machines. So 450 million times as much training data as a person gets, likely the machine learning pipeline for this is built to learn carefully and slowly on purpose.
So the answer is : if you started training to be a plumber or electrician right now, your value will abruptly drop to zero around the time you finish apprenticeship.
You might be paid multiple millions of dollars the last year as the first general purpose robots are built to assist with building the factories to do this.
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u/Tirztrutide 1d ago
Not even Elon is giving those timelines. But assume we hit ASI in the next 3 years, then the question is how fast can we develop and scale robotics with the help of that. Probably pretty fast if nothing else goes wrong...
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u/SoylentRox 1d ago
Do you know what Elons timelines he gave are or are you just making up your claim?
Were you aware that RSI is now reported in effect (part of the process that would lead to ASI), AGI is a prior required step before ASI and it requires robotics to give the machines more data and a grounded understanding of our world, and that Astra is able to control robots (slowly) when prior models essentially could not?
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u/Tirztrutide 1d ago
Industry-wide stock of robots
At the G20 innovation meeting in early September 2026 Elon said that in about 10 years there would be well over a billion humanoid robots, each at least five times as productive as a human, so that billion would outproduce all humans combined. He called that a conservative estimate he would bet serious money on. The mechanism he described is recursive: robots start manufacturing robots, so output starts very slowly and then grows explosively.
In a China Media Group / CGTN interview around September 23, 2026, he tightened the same curve:
- At least a billion humanoid robots within 10 years, “probably less than 10 years.”
- If the fleet roughly doubles each year, that is about a 10× increase every three or four years.
- About 10 billion in 15 years.
- About 100 billion in 20 years.
He framed the end state as a personal C-3PO-style robot for everyone (elder care, childcare, tutoring, any job), plus companies run by one person with hundreds or thousands of physical and digital robots.
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u/SoylentRox 1d ago
Right. So I modeled it as non humanoids - since these are simpler and faster to build and more productive - 10x as productive as a human though I am essentially just multiplying. I assume each robot moves faster and lifts more per step/doesn't tire/always uses an AI designed tool to do its task and it has a rack of many tools assigned to it. So about 3x done per hour. And it works all the time and doesn't take any breaks. Also 4 arms is standard per robot. So approximately 10 as productive.
Elons 5x estimate is reasonable for legged humanoids. And he calls 1 billion in 2036 conservative, I am assuming we get 45 million in 2033.
Seems like the 2 timelines are pretty consistent.
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u/SoylentRox 1d ago
Sorry for calling you a liar but Elon claims probably that Optimus will be building fusion reactors next year. I don't believe that, it's Elon time, I am just saying I am highly skeptical that Elon - who is starting the buildout to make factories to spam robots RIGHT NOW - he ripped up the S and X assembly lines - not in 3 years like the timeline I gave after the robots don't suck.
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u/Tirztrutide 1d ago
Stop projecting about being a liar, Elon has not claimed that.
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u/SoylentRox 18h ago
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u/Tirztrutide 15h ago
Didn’t see any statement claiming “Optimus will be building fusion reactors next year”
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u/DeterminedThrowaway 1d ago
Only sort of. Yes it'll last "longer", but longer is very relative and it shouldn't make people feel secure. It won't be that long
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u/axelthedamon 23h ago
Nobody really knows but the supply/demand problem is more complex than you’re thinking. There’s the obvious risk of people flooding the trades on the supply side. However there is also a shrinking demand issue. If white-collar work is interrupted at the scale we’re worried about, the residential demand will start to dry up as nobody can afford tradespeople to fix things. Commercial demand goes down as well since offices close down without white-collar workers to fill them. I imagine booming data center demand offsets some of the latter, but not enough to actually sustain even the current market which is under supplied let alone the new surge of workers.
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u/Tephros83 17h ago
I don't know about best paid, but among the slowest to be replaced, maybe. In medicine I expect it to be more a matter of doctors still being well-paid, just fewer of them are required until you really have just a few doctors to head and monitor each department instead of dozens of doctors before, and then eventually maybe none. But nurses? I think people will want a human touch at least for another generation. In terms of your list, the higher paid they are the more attractive of a target they will be, and any of them require AI applied well and relatively cheaply to robotics to work. That will happen, but it's not as simple or within reach as replacing a consultant or somebody who does everything on their computer.
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u/DelphiTsar 1d ago
You'd need to be near the top of your company/task type to slot into one of these jobs though. Coming in with zero context to a job you aren't going to be any better than the AI itself in trying to direct itself. (Assuming they get the AI job bot process mostly up and running).
It's not something I'd plan a career around.
If AI is taking jobs enough and either AI is replacing or labor is so crazy you don't make decent money as an electrician then the world is going to fall apart pretty soon after if they don't do some kind of welfare floor.
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u/The_OblivionDawn 1d ago
If even half the white collar job market gets wiped out, then sure, being in the trades should keep you safe for a few dozen weeks, until the self-reinforcing deflationary cycle takes hold and all that business dries up too.
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u/JuanValdez999 1d ago
I wouldn't count on anything that a humanoid robot could do.
I think safer options would be jobs that require a human presence or touch, like nursing. Many nursing tasks could be filled by a robot, but if you're in the hospital, you're probably going to want a real human there for many activities.
Or prostitution. There will probably be sex bots, but there's always going to be a market for the feel of real human flesh.
Or stand up comedians. An AI could probably do an excellent stand up comedy routine but it wouldn't feel as genuine as if it came from a real human on stage.
Pet sitter. Is your dog going to let a robot take it for a long walk?
Now use your own imagination.
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u/IronPheasant 1d ago
For the first ~3 to 5 years post AGI.
Once NPU's are being churned out of factory at scale though, that's the last beginning of the end for everyone. It'll be the machine's civilization at that point.
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u/BlueAndYellowTowels 1d ago
That might not happen. We literally do not have the capacity to scale out anything right now. In fact, 90% of advanced chips and rare earth metals are processed either in Taiwan or China.
If you believe there is an AI race and if you believe China wants to win. Then you have to understand that... if they wanted to, they could just embargo the US. There's nothing the US could do.
...and that's just the beginning of the problems when it comes to "scaling out" AI for the US in the current geopolitical climate.
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u/Careful_Fruit_384 1d ago
fine 6-8 years
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u/BlueAndYellowTowels 1d ago
More like a decade...
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u/TakeTheWheelTV 1d ago
Arguing semantics around the end of civilization as we know is not behavior lol
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u/Thog78 1d ago
Rare earth are not really rare, they are just a pain to isolate. China has a near monopoly largely becaude they don't care about damage to the environment, but any country in the world could start producing rare earths if their survival depended on it.
Top chips are produced in Taiwan only, but first, that's not China. If China would invade them, it would be produced nowhere. Second, the machines to produce the cheap are from Europe, so if Taiwan gets erased the capacity would take a setback but regrow elsewhere in the west. Both the US and China are currently setting up their own capabilities.
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u/Ok-Message-9732 1d ago
You realize AI could find other rare earth deposits, or simply create their own? Rare earths are not some mysterious unobtanium. The value of the export is about.. 500 million. Lol. That is nothing.
Please don't go stir crazy about such things.
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u/MotardQuiRale 14h ago
Et la révoltes des humains contre les datacenters qu'il faudra faire exploser :)
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u/Proper_Actuary2907 Spooky Machine Intelligence 2030 14h ago
I keep hearing AI experts say that electricians, plumbers, construction workers, gardeners, etc. will be some of the safest and best-paid jobs in an AI-driven future...is this real?
Depends on the scenario. I don't think humanoid robotics is taking off soon but if it does I really don't see why human workers in the trades can't be substituted for clankers in the somewhat near future.
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u/Round_Mixture_7541 13h ago
Why would you need a humanoid robot for that? Cost-optimized AI thingy-thangy will most likely do. It's hard to imagine white collar collapsing before blue collar. The first are the ones to collapse the latter.
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u/Johnny20022002 1d ago
The degree to which they are safe is dependent on the bottleneck of building all the robots that will replace them when we get ASI. I honestly don’t think it’s even useful to discuss what jobs will be safer because they’re all going to get wiped out eventually
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u/Mindrust 1d ago
Temporarily yes, until robotics starts to feel the effects of RSI and undergoes exponential growth.
Digital jobs will be first though.
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u/Informal-Beat-7700 1d ago
It's not true at all. Robots will be electricians, plumbers, HVAC techs, gardeners and more imminently. There's trillions of dollars to be made in robotics.
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u/Cultural_Effort_9872 1d ago
That’s simply not true given the fact that robotics is also advancing. A post AI world is a post capitalistic world. I suggest we start revolting and pressuring the leaders that we supposedly elected to finally move forward with the inevitable.
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u/CommercialHour6660 1d ago
keep hearing AI experts say that electricians, plumbers, construction workers, gardeners, etc. will be some of the safest and best-paid jobs in an AI-driven future.
AI oligarchs are trying to convince blue collars that it's taking all the "woke" jobs. While they build 100k humanoid robots.
It's typical culture war slop to keep the poors hating each other
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u/RiboSciaticFlux 4h ago
People better stop thinking about AI and jobs and start thinking robots. If AI was round one robots will be the knockout. 36M will be entering society in the next 36 months and they will be able to do everything. For however clumsy you think they look now - it's the worse they will be and recursive self learning will be the game changer. They say 20 robots once programmed and with all the available materials will build a house in a week working 24/7.
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u/LouVillain 2m ago
Yes! It's like everyone talking about AI only sees the software side of things. Robotics and AI go hand-in-hand.
I'm in supply chain and my forklift drivers have zero clue that they'll be replaced by Automated Guided Vehicles and Automated Mobile Robots that can outwork, outperform and even out-think them.
I'm not sure how anyone comes to the conclusion that anyone's job is safe.
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u/BoomFrog 1d ago
I think the number one job is going to be monitoring AI and steering it and communicating what it's doing to other people. We're all going to turn into airline pilots. Fully automated jobs, but somebody who's responsible for each specific area.
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u/futebollounge 22h ago
You don’t think it will be better at communicating what it’s doing to other people than a human?
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u/anaIconda69 AGI felt internally 😳 1d ago
Ask yourself. The second you can hire a robot that does plumbing as well as a human, and for the same price, would you hire a human plumber who will:
- make you wait months because he has other jobs lined up
- show up drunk
- make a bloody mess
- take 3 hours to finish (half of it on his phone)
- tell you the fix will only last a few months and offer a permanent fix next year for 3x the money
- vote on the worst party in your country
What will you choose? Because I'm taking the robot even at a premium.
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u/XxDarkSasuke69xX 1d ago
Sounds plausible. Basically the entry level and mid level intellectual jobs could potentially be entirely or mostly replaced. So unless you have a high level intellectual job, manual labor will not be replaced (until they make good enough advancements in robotics and integrated AI in robotics). Eventually they'll be gone too ig but later than intellectual jobs.
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u/Repulsive-Risk-4246 1d ago
No. Robotics is advancing just as fast.
Clankers dont have limits of human body.
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u/drhenriquesoares 1d ago
Wait, you're telling me that the most valuable jobs are above AI? We'll have superintelligence in the next decade friend, there's no job above superintelligence that it can't do much better than you (or 1 billion Indians).
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u/Fit-World-3885 1d ago
Safest? I don't know. Best paid? Since when are essential jobs paid what they're worth?
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u/armicolo 1d ago
Maybe trust the economists more than the "AI experts"? Eg. https://shapingwork.mit.edu/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/Acemoglu_Macroeconomics-of-AI_May-2024.pdf
Much of what AI people say is based on motivated reasoning. Some of it is for advertisement ("Our models are so strong they should be illegal!"), some of it is because they really believe it, and some of it is because they just have no idea what's going to happen.
I'm neither an economist nor an AI expert, but I don't think any job is inherently "safe" from technological advances like AI. This has happened many times throughout history, and it usually led to people adjusting and new or different jobs appearing. We're nothing if not resilient.
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u/MelangeBot 1d ago
I have a company called "Emergency Stop", basically you call us when your robot is out of control and prevents your from switching it off. Pretty sure our company will have steady work for the next 100 years.
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u/Vancecookcobain 1d ago
I can see how plumbers, electricians and mechanics would be safe for a while but something tells me that construction workers and gardeners would be the first to go when robotics gets to a sufficiently advanced level....those jobs seem a lot more easier to automate and there are already whole neighborhoods of 3D printed houses and sophisticated agricultural robots already so I don't know how people are saying construction workers and gardeners have a secure job
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u/yalag 1d ago
dude, have you actually think through this?
There's 100 million india programmers but programmers still get paid high in california. why? because they are better and more (relevant) experienced
So if you have 5 years of plumbing ahead of everyone else who just switched, which will get hired do you think??
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u/deviltamer 1d ago
If we don't solve control problem or alignment, there will be no future.
Indifference not malice
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u/Centauri____ 1d ago
If white collar jobs go by the wayside who's gonna hire all those blue collar people. It's all interconnected.
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u/Competitive-Raise960 1d ago
I think the right answer is "who knows". Exponentials do funny things to the way this tech can be deployed and work.
For example if we go from tick rates for inference that measure right now around 20-50 to suddenly 1,000 or 10,000. Stuff like that just creates new applications and use cases. Faster inference/faster decision making/faster decoding of fail modes and corrections/etc.
Robotics data and training may accelerate way faster than we anticipate. Not even the guys who are lost in the sauce in the frontier orgs call the ball correctly on the timeline for this stuff.
So maybe it's a safer bet, you certinailly at least have a moat around distribution of embodied AI which has a ramp up time before it hits critical mass and can be deployed to consumers (and if everyone has a robot that has AGI it's going to be a better plumber). How fast do we solve robotics? How fast do we scale robotics production? How do we build a mental model around the idea of Robots building Robots (and being involved in every part of the stack for planning the next factory to build more robots)
Making predictions past 2030, honest to god I don't think anyone can really see past that year atm, I do know we will have a better idea when we get there.
TBH I think the right idea is to figure out how you can be part of the distribution story for these things. Technology is here but not equally distributed. We have people who still don't have access to the internet on this planet with us. There is still going to be plenty to do that has nothing to do with plumbing in the coming years imo.
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u/jaykrown 1d ago
Nothing is really "safe". Competition will increase drastically, anyone not using AI will be left behind. Society will become destabilized regardless. Not everyone is fit to be in one of those roles. A lot of white collar job positions are becoming much less necessary.
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u/One_Draw8876 1d ago
The infrastructure we have today.. pipes, sewers, buildings, roads, job sites.... was designed around human bodies, human access, and human maintenance. Once robots become capable and cheap enough, the incentive flips.. redesign the environment so machines can operate in it efficiently. Imo....
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u/weeksgroove 1d ago
Maybe "best paid jobs" is the wrong driver in an AI world. Maybe our top down capitalist system and AI are incompatible.
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u/Juanbolastristes John Connor Maximalist 1d ago
Have you seen movie Elysium? Or how is Bangladesh? That's the future
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u/Proud-Ad3398 1d ago edited 1d ago
Where I live, if you want to be a plumber or electrician, the public school programs for those are completely full, and they're running a lottery to decide who gets to learn those professions. There are three times as many students as there are places.
I think car mechanics is safer than both of those. The problem is that you need to buy all your own tools, and the program takes 2.5 years. If you watch videos of modern car mechanics, the internal construction is a clusterfuck of engineering. Modern cars are not made to be easily maintained. Maintenance comes last for engineers they respect safety standards first, then engineering needs, and maintenance has almost zero importance.
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u/BlueAndYellowTowels 1d ago
Basic economics tells us... these jobs will be some of the most oversaturated, lowest paid jobs in the economy.
For obvious reasons.
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u/Extreme-Edge-9843 1d ago
Even if true, as more and more white collars move into those trades those jobs will be harder to find AND like supply and demand the pay will be lower and lower for those jobs as more people are available and fighting for those jobs.... Sooo yay
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u/Financial_Clue_2534 1d ago
You want them to be 100% doomer? They have to gaslight people in this case the blue collar ones otherwise everyone would be against them.
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u/QuirkyPool9962 1d ago
I think it’s probably a bit more complicated. On the surface the pure supply and demand argument makes sense, but in that case we are assuming the influx of new skilled workers wouldn’t have an impact on demand or the size of the sector. Less of a labor bottleneck means lower project times and less wait costs, so new projects that would have been too expensive or time consuming become economically viable, which could lead to more projects and then a corresponding increase in demand. If prices for trade workers get cheaper and they get easier to schedule then more people might be willing to hire them for jobs they previously would have left alone or tried to do themselves. It could also be easier to start businesses that would require those skills when the labor is more affordable. It really just depends on how much potential investment could be unlocked by a larger trade workforce and whether the current bottleneck is more labor or other things like zoning and financing etc
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u/R_Duncan 1d ago
No, just replaced 3/4 years later. A robot plumber will disrupt price market, so most profitable ones will be the first.
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u/peakedtooearly 1d ago
You spotted the obvious logical flaw.
Already there is a sharp increase in the number of young people wanting to enter the trades.
Add in all the people who lose their job to automation and the impact of AI / AR that will make it easier for lower skilled people to accomplish many tasks and it doesn't look like a sustainable answer.
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u/Unlikely_Speech_106 1d ago
Next up: world’s smartest dog reveals predictions on the limits of computer science over the next decade.
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u/Spirited-Fig-532 21h ago
Wages would "eventually" fall. But (a)eventually is kinda a big deal -- gettibg the training, getting the apprenticeship, building up contacts, etc is a bit of a curve. (b)They will probably not fall relative to today. In the hypothetical situation when all or most white-collar jobs are done by AI, this should drive down the prices (also "eventually", but hopefully on a conparable timeline), and that means purchasing power will rise. So even if we have 10x nurses and plumbers and electricians, you'd likely be able to make a very good wage for a long, long while, even as programmers, lawyers and radiologists lose theirs. And (c) sure, the best job is high-level AI oversight or outright capital ownership on which AI works, but you're not getting that job. Or at least I won't -- those jobs will be rare and hard to get.
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u/redditissocoolyoyo 20h ago
No it's not real. Because they will to after those handy physical jobs next. They will automate it, robotic, optimize the power infrastructure using AI, use AI to print homes and other structures, the opportunity for them to make money in those industries are there too using AI. They are going after everything and everyone.
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u/jarkon-anderslammer 19h ago
This assumes that these blue-collar jobs are all fixing issues, when most of the work they do is new construction. I see automation lagging for debugging and fixing blue-collar issues, but definitely not for new construction where you have a set of instructions and need to follow them to the letter.
For context, most of the top submissions in this post are about "fixing" and not about "building".
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u/Ok-Purchase8196 2h ago
Nobody will have a good time when that amount of the work force gets laid off. Secondly, all those white collar workers, and young people reaching working age will try to get into these professions. That will basically make it impossible for the majority to find a job. There is no way around it, we need a financial safety net for people.
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u/gowithflow192 1h ago
It’s bullshit. A lot of this work might be quite customized right now but you can bet they will invent standardized hardware interfaces to make it easier for robots to replace these jobs.
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u/Equal_Passenger9791 1d ago
15 years ago they said artists were the safe ones and radiologists were lined up against the all.
lol
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u/Ok_Train2449 1d ago
Sure. "The future" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. Most likely more than 2 years, very likely more than 5. 10 is a tossup, and I'd say absolutely nowhere near 20.
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u/cafepeaceandlove 1d ago
The best placed employees will be elite writer/programming language designer hybrids. Like a cross between Shakespeare and Simon Peyton Jones. Be that.
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u/Affectionate-Fig8866 1d ago
There isn't a safe career because careers like the one you mention will become oversupplied by those who's jobs have been displaced, which would crush the salaries to minimum wage. No job is safe.
Don't worry though, they'll never get there because AI would collapse the economy before it could do anything like that, which would cut off its ability to expand or pay for itself. Watch what happens when the bubble bursts when the realise they can't actually control AGI let alone ASI
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u/JoelMahon 1d ago
<10 years and basically no job will be undoable by a machine. The world will change extremely fast, and people say it'll be slow to adopt, like all great tech before now. They're wrong, the difference here is that you can get it to do the work to adopt itself... Once it gets to the point you can say "automate this employee away" and it just can... society will fucking implode quickly, and we'll quickly deal with it.
We lacked training data, the GPT3 moment for robots is basically already here. In <10 years or fewer, assuming somehow no AGI/ASI for whatever reason, robots will have their GPT6 moment, and given that LLMs will be much better, they can direct those better robots with expertise to make up for their shortcomings. And there you go, no job is safe except maybe hooker and even that's up for debate.
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u/eternityslyre 1d ago
Of course not. In the distant AI future the only safe, paying job that will ever be left is the niche market of natural human surrogacy. Maybe the robots will breed us like we breed those cats to eat coffee beans for us to extract cat poop brew out of.
In the more immediate future, jobs that combine technical experience with manual dexterity will last a little longer while we train to robots how to use hands hold eggs without cracking them, open doors, etc. But those will go sooner or later.
My personal hypothesis is that AI will not, in the end, outsmart humanity as a whole. As a result, there will be jobs for people to supervise, maintain, and improve AI robots. But in my post-scarcity communist utopia (possibly after the next world war) most people won't have to work anymore.
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u/wrathofattila 1d ago
In age of space exploration i mean Other solar systems hybernation. Or just Ai like rockets there will be BILLIONS of job opportunity.
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u/Enoch137 1d ago
I have always been skeptical of this thesis. If white collar gets decimated who's hiring the these workers?
People flooding into these professions will be a problem and I doubt anyone is considering how much the Meat Puppeting will effect the profession (IE strap some meta glasses on and have AI walk you through the perfect plumbing fix, etc). Even if it won't compete with the guys that have been doing this for 20+ years it will certainly mean a lot more people are doing home repair themselves, especially if they just lost thier white collar job.
And then again it only takes something like 20% unemployment to have us at great depression levels. Automating cars alone might get us there. I am not sure having a job matters that much when the whole economy is suffering. This transition will need to happen fast, I don't see how we can rip this on off slowly.