Comment by tempest_
5 days ago
Everyone can't be a plumber.
In fact one of the worst "trade offs" of the trades is they can very much be a young mans game.
It gets real hard to sling water heaters up/down tight stairs or pull cable in a 100+ degree attic into your 50s.
> Everyone can't be a plumber.
Yes, but not for the reasons you say. It’s because if everyone is a plumber, you don’t need plumbers.
Also I imagine a lot of demand for plumbers might drop because AI might help you to learn to solve easy cases. Imagine you turn on you camera and it would just tell you what to do exactly.
I have just called a plumber to do a leaking radiator replacement. Not because I don't have the tools or I don't have YouTube, but because I didn't want to do it.
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Yes, buuut: I think we are already really close to that for a long time. You could learn a lot just from internet and youtube. But most people, I feel, just do not like to neither do plumbing/diy nor learn about it. Like if I tell people they can save hundreds of € by changing their own brake pads and that it is really easy to diy, they just shrug and go to the mechanic. So I am not sure if AI will really increase the percentage of people willing to learn these skills and do repairs etc
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Plumbers are paid well because of the way they organized.
-They restricted the number of apprentices. That limited the number of people in the field similar to medical school.
-They could bar substandard workers from practising in the city of London.
-They kept their craft knowledge in house and it was never written down. Apprentices swore oaths never to reveal the “secret of the mystery.”
If you look at programming we do everything the opposite. It’s no wonder salaries will collapse. In fact the only question is why didn’t they collapse sooner.
You've clearly never asked Claude for help with plumbing.
It's a humbling reminder that not all fields of knowledge application are verifiable in post-training.
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That'll be Wario's arc in the next Super Mario movie.
"...And when everyone's a plumber... no one will be!"
Get the young guys to do the lifting, there’s still plenty of room for old guys with experience who know all the tips, tricks and gotchyas.
Edit: Fair point, you don’t want to be entering a trade which requires heavy lifting as an older guy with no experience.
If you are 40 making a career change you have no experience tips or tricks.
When you lose your white collar job to AI you don’t have those tips, tricks, and gotchas for whatever work is left for you.
To be an old guy with experience you need to start as a young guy.