Comment by darth_avocado
5 days ago
> 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.
5 days ago
> 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.
That was always true if you could afford it.
But get a little more squeezed and with less salary due to AI eliminating your job or your field's salary bargaining power, and you'll try to not call one if you can avoid it, even if you don't want to do it yourself.
1 reply →
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
Yeah the information has been available for awhile. What stops people is all the indoctrination and conditioning.
"I'm not allowed to replace my water heater, the government says I need permits, the government says only a plumber can connect a gas line"
I don't think people realize that the people doing entry level skilled work like replacing your water heater or swapping your brakes at jiffy lube often only exceed the caliber of labor that's in a McDonalds when it comes to attendance and pissing clean.
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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.
Definitely. IMO, plumbing is one of those trades that videos on YouTube seem to help a lot more than an LLM. Code and simple stuff an LLM is great, but anything more complex or getting into heavy installation not so much.
That'll be Wario's arc in the next Super Mario movie.
"...And when everyone's a plumber... no one will be!"