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Blue-collar jobs are gaining popularity as AI threatens office work

62 points by geox 1y ago

rayiner 1y ago
Given the degree to which knowledge workers dominate politics, the rush to erect legal barriers to AI adoption is going to be rapid. It’s already happening: https://idfpr.illinois.gov/news/2025/gov-pritzker-signs-state-leg-prohibiting-ai-therapy-in-il.html https://idfpr.illinois.gov/news/2025/gov-pritzker-signs-stat...
- billy99k 1y ago
  It just means countries like China will offer these services and gain an advantage over the US.
  - stego-tech 1y ago
    Except not really, as evidenced by China hamstringing private rollout of AI tools like facial recognition or data-based surveillance and retaining those solely for the government’s use. They know that whatever issues the US is grappling with now, they’re not too far behind, and they have the added benefit of learning from our mistakes. Governments have as much to fear from mass labor displacement as they do to gain from AI-turbocharged surveillance and warfare. It’s why competent regimes will tighten rules to stem or stop unnecessary bleeding and preserve their power.
- fennecbutt 1y ago
  Too little too late. I mean we all deserve it tbh, apathetic tribal species.
- techpineapple 1y ago
  AI therapy is hardly a good example of trying to erect barriers to AI adoption. I don’t think they’re trying to protect practitioners they’re trying to protect patients. I will be absolutely shocked if there is any real attempt to regulate AI adoption. Capitalists gotta capital.
  - JamesBarney 1y ago
    Who do you think is spending money lobbying politicians to ban this? Do you think it's a depressed patients activist group who is scared someone might try to sell them a cheap always available AI therapist? Or do you think it's a therapist group who just so happens to be pushing for barriers that protect their jobs while gaslighting themselves into thinking it's to protect their patients.
    - techpineapple 1y ago
      The first. No one gives a fuck about workers. I hope I’m wrong by the way, nothing would make me happier than LLm’s being regulated out of existence.
- givemeethekeys 1y ago
  Yes, just like we rushed to forming unions! /s Unfortunately I don’t think meritocracy and protectionism make for good roommates inside white collar brains.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
- pydry 1y ago
  Workers do not dominate politics in any way, shape or form. Owners do.
  - rayiner 1y ago
    Society has multiple classes with distinct interests. It’s not just “owners versus workers.” In the U.S., the top 0.1% own about 14% of the wealth, but most of the rest is owned by the top 25% outside the top 0.1%. Within this class there is a spectrum of “ownership.” Tim Cook is technically a worker, but he has “owner” wealth. But he came into that wealth by being a worker—he never risked his own capital to start a business, nor did he inherit assets. This is especially true for knowledge work, where putative workers typically are non-fungible in ways that give them a great deal of leverage with owners.
    - pydry 1y ago
      Society does have multiple classes, yes but one in particular dominates politics - the ownership class. See here for the relevant study: https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-echochambers-27074746 https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-echochambers-27074746
      - rayiner 1y ago
        That study defines “elite” as the top 10% of income earners, which is mostly skilled and knowledge workers, not owners. I can’t access the PDF but there was a reddit thread about the methodology: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskSocialScience/comments/73nbuv/in_testing_theories_of_american_politics_elites/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=mweb3x&utm_name=mweb3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button https://www.reddit.com/r/AskSocialScience/comments/73nbuv/in.... So that is consistent with my point that knowledge workers have lots of political power. Also, Vox did a piece discussing subsequent research that suggests that whatever effect Gilens and Page are seeing is relatively weak: https://www.vox.com/2016/5/9/11502464/gilens-page-oligarchy-study https://www.vox.com/2016/5/9/11502464/gilens-page-oligarchy-.... I suspect you’d find a stronger correlation if you compared knowledge workers versus blue collar workers (I.e. accounted for the fact that you have fairly affluent tradespeople and medium income knowledge workers, like entry level folks who work in marketing).
- intended 1y ago
  Blanket characterization of regulation, as malicious barriers to AI adoption, creates the perfect smoke screen to deflect discussion of the actual problems we are seeing. The law you linked to prohibits firms from using AI to provide therapy, this doesn’t stop people from doing it anyway. It’s a far cry from saying that knowledge workers are rushing to erect legal barriers to AI adoption. A large number of knowledge workers are busy trying to increase adoption of AI, a behavior at odds with your claim. That this argument is made, in a forum populated by knowledge workers, is ironic.
  - JamesBarney 1y ago
    What problem does preventing companies from providing AI back mental health services does this legislation provide except? > protecting the jobs of Illinois’ thousands of qualified behavioral health providers
    - intended 1y ago
      Are you unaware that genAI tools reaffirm beliefs of people in manic or delusional states?
- lurk2 1y ago
  Most professional services already have a moat around them in that you need to be licensed in order to practice the profession; AI can’t disrupt these industries because A) after three years, the hallucination issue has not improved and B) the AI itself can’t legally perform most of the services a licensed professional is permitted to provide. It’s easy to write off this sort of regulation as economic protectionism if you’re a true believer in the technology, but from personal experience, the LLMs I have used are only really good for solving well-understood programming problems and doing what Google used to do 10 years ago. You can maybe use them to power some blackhat marketing efforts but most of what I’ve seen there are just run-of-the-mill spam operations that have discovered Reddit.
- beepbooptheory 1y ago
  What level of institutional and cultural acceptance, de jure or de facto, would be needed to make you feel otherwise here? Like on its face, looking around the world, this sentiment feels absurd right now. We are moving mountains to build this stuff up. AI is not the lowly underdog here, it is immediately the top of the food chain. If things are not moving fast enough for you, that feels more like personal contradiction you are working through here. Like it almost sounds like you want this to be the 90s again and be a Cypherpunk advocating for cause, but you look around and actually you're already the suits, the feds; you're on top, and the virtuous fight for freedom was null and void from the start. So all you can do is force yourself into feeling like a victim always already. September was too short!
- insane_dreamer 1y ago
  > knowledge workers^H^H^H^H^H^Howners dominate politics fixed it for you
billy99k 1y ago
My cousin was a software engineer for two decades. He got laid off and couldn't find a job for two years. He's now a mechanic.
- mmcromp 1y ago
  How does he feel about that? how long did his apprenticeship last, did even need one or did he have an "in"? How does his pay relate to old software work? How is the toll on his body? Does he think he can keep doing it into old age?
bm3719 1y ago
Our gestating Machine God doesn't yet have hands as good as ours, so good this is good advice. We had a system of overproduction of sentient office equipment, who waste their time on pointless Zoom calls and sending emails that no one reads. That had to end sooner or later, and was already about to collapse on its own. BS job holders are miserable anyway. Let's give these people purpose (closing the gap between activity and tangible output), free them from debt-slavery, and fix all the broken infrastructure around us.
- jappgar 1y ago
  The idea that aging office workers can learn to weld is even dumber than thinking aging welders can learn to code.
  - jMyles 1y ago
    ...neither of those sound the least bit dumb to me.
    - intended 1y ago
      Which is why theres evidence that it doesn’t work to help us learn from the mistakes of the past.
  - tomrod 1y ago
    Welding is not hard to learn. It just takes practice.
    - dare944 1y ago
      Nope. Try TIG on aluminum or titanium. I will never be able to do this well enough to get certified because, simply put, I'm well past my prime dexterity years. But I can still write some damn fine embedded code.
- Rover222 1y ago
  Tesla Optimus hands are iterating rapidly and are already incredible. I know it’s taboo to claim anything positive about any Musk company. But Optimus is coming. To fold my laundry and do my dishes. And maybe one day strip some wires.
stego-tech 1y ago
I mean, good? We need more tradespeople than we do office workers - and we need everyone in both fields to be paid substantially more than they presently earn, which will only come about through new business creation, something tradespeople dominate. Software engineers won’t power the green energy transformation so much as skilled electricians, architects, contractors, and builders. More finance people won’t replace aging and inefficient infrastructure so much as more road workers, pipe fitters, plumbers, and wastewater engineers. I think the current (over)hype around LLMs replacing jobs wholesale is an excellent catalyst for this shift, but I also acknowledge that the pendulum was already naturally swinging that way after decades of over-prioritizing white collar work as the only means of joining the shrinking middle class.
- mmcromp 1y ago
  What makes you think we need more trades people?
  - tomrod 1y ago
    Whst makes you think we don't?
    - mmcromp 1y ago
      Because I'm from working class, rust belt and ive seen the reality the state of America blue collar, not just the "the guy who installed my TV said he owns his own business and makes almost as much as me working in software" fantasy. I've also had a front row seat to "just learn JavaScript" go from great career advice to joke in the span of time it'd take you to finish a trade apprenticeship.
- eszed 1y ago
  Agreed. If this also raises the social status of blue collar work / workers - I mean that someone with a college degree won't feel ashamed to work in the trades, or that, say, a diesel mechanic wouldn't feel out of place at a book club - this will also be a positive development.
CapitalistCartr 1y ago
I'm an industrial electrician. I have zero fears of being replaced by any any sort of AI. Maybe by someone younger and smarter, but I have 38 years experience. The trades are a decent living, and lots of people could do worse.
- Rover222 1y ago
  My grandpa was a master electrician. My father was a master electrician. I am a software engineer. I am sweating. I feel like we have another 2 or 3 years and then it might be over. I will go work in the mines.
- frankdorr35 1y ago
  Same here, however with the new meta glasses or the augmented reality glasses you're going to see people with no knowledge of our field actually troubleshooting machines with technicians remotely. They will be paid a lot less than us.
  - i_am_proteus 1y ago
    I wonder who will be held at fault when the low-paid in-person troubleshooter discovers 15kV with his fingers (I do not wonder who will be killed) while his lock opens the wrong breaker. The business is not broken and does not need "fixing."
    - techpineapple 1y ago
      > The business is not broken and does not need "fixing." Welcome to tech, that’s what we do here.
    - idkwhattocallme 1y ago
      But it is broken. There is a shortage of every type of trades worker. Sure it's been great for existing trade folks because there are plenty of jobs and the pay is great more demand than supply. But the lack of supply has meant that it's too expensive to build/fix stuff. If you're in the US look around. It looks like we literally stopped building in the 1950s. Every renovation/building project is multi-year. Why? The lack of plentiful skilled trades people is one of the reasons the US building and infrastructure are deteriorating.
techpineapple 1y ago
Something that bugs me about all these articles. It’s all bullshit. Almost any future is possible at this point and the data can be analyzed in almost any way. Could be AI, could be the economy, could be vibes. You’ll just get stupider reading all this shit.
- jimbohn 1y ago
  A huge problem of articles in general is that they are made to entertain you rather than inform you because of ad-driven incentives. It's indeed all bullshit.
tolerance 1y ago
I wonder what effects this will have in the long run, as people attuned to white-collar labor and culture begin to assume jobs usually held by people who aren’t...
sciencesama 1y ago
wait till robots come for their jobs !
techpineapple 1y ago
I generally don’t believe in Panacea’s, and if these jobs were so great and the solution to all our problems, why is it when we live in a country where a large percentage of folks are rural or otherwise have blue collar values, there not pursuing them? Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying all blue collar jobs are bad, many are fantastic! But like all things, it’s likely a pyramid. Just like a lot of software engineering jobs are shitty. If it is offered as a panacea, then the glut of applicants will just drive down wages.
charliebwrites 1y ago
An interesting thing about blue collar work, especially when you’re your own boss, is that when things get more expensive, you can raise your rates When you have a salary, you’re getting paid what you’re getting paid and nothing more and hoping whatever raise might come is better than inflation
- 1123581321 1y ago
  What percentage of blue collar workers are self-employed compared to white collar workers?
  - SoftTalker 1y ago
    I would guess higher but it's based on personal experience. Compared to freelance software devs, I know a lot more "sole proprietor" handymen type guys, i.e. they specialize in bathroom and kitchen renovations, or other "home improvement" jobs that one guy can do by himself or maybe with a helper. The real tradesmen (plumbers, electricians, etc.) will often start their own businesses, especially once they get to know and be known by the local contractors, and end up doing bigger new construction jobs with dozens of employees. The comparable white-collar version of this would be the experienced developer or marketer who starts their own consultancy or agency. I think it would be more rare to see a true "start up" in the blue collar world. Most of their work is regulated by code and there isn't as much room to compete on innovation, you have to compete on reputation and experience and that can't be substituted by VC money.
lordnacho 1y ago
A lot of blue-collar jobs require apprenticeships. You can read complaints in several countries about how hard it is to find one.
- mtoner23 1y ago
  agreed, the trades intentionally restrict who can become trained. its the reason they are called trades in the first place. restrict labor supply to pump up their own wages
- dgb23 1y ago
  Switzerland and Germany have very good systems for apprenticeships. However, one of the challenges is to find them as you said. Apprentices typically start at a young age (16) and you have wildly different levels of maturity there. Another issue is that many jobs aren’t attractive to locals (anymore), and immigrants fight the uphill battle of having to learn the language, culture etc.
- tmm 1y ago
  And a long one at that. I’m sure I could do well as an electrician eventually, but there’s no way I could make it through 4+ years as an apprentice making $21/hr, and then another three as a journeyman (even if it pays double). Maybe when my house is paid off (but who’s going to hire a 50yr old apprentice?). The biggest problem with an apprenticeship model is that it creates a bottleneck to getting people into the trades. You need competent journeymen (and knowing the trade isn’t enough, they need to be able to teach) who ideally can take on more than one apprentice at a time. But no matter how much everyone “wants young people in the trades” and no matter how much of a “shortage of tradespeople” there is, the bigger shortage is apprentice positions. Every kid in the world could suddenly decide they want to be electricians and plumbers, and it would still take two generations to fill the ranks. Note that I’m mostly focusing on trades that require state licensing. Laborers, carpenters, painters, plasterers, welders, etc. don’t suffer this problem as much, because there is no set amount of time for someone to be an apprentice. If you’re good and reliable you’re getting promoted fast. I’m not against licensing per se, but I am strongly against legislated work requirements for a job. I know I could study for a week and pass the master electrician exam on Monday.
shit_game 1y ago
Blue collar jobs are only going to be the go-to for as long as the labor supply is lower than the commercial demand, which I doubt will be long (if this is even the case now). It takes a non-neglible amount of time to train (or certify) for these jobs in much of the western world, which means that any bump in demand is met with a significant lag in supply. Once that supply catches up, the momentum of people saying "bro just go to trade school instead of college, plumbers/electricians/welders/dirt farmers make $100k" is going to dump thousands and thousands of juniors into a market that will very quickly oversaturate. We are witnessing this at an accelerated rate with software development and other tech jobs, largely due to extreme external factors (high interest rates limiting VC cash flow, Trump's hostile domestic economic policies[0], demonstrable downward pressure on employment mobility and wage suppression from big tech[1]). The american "middle class" is still shrinking, but now it's shrinking faster than ever before, largely because the capital class wants more money, and there is one more stone to bleed. Creating a market of blue collar professionals who will be blackballed from white collar markets due to their educational and work histories (in tandem with the desired outcome of using AI workloads for these jobs in lieu of people) will raise the commercial value of these white collar services, while gatekeeping their entry and stagnating/lowering their compensation. The ladder is being set on fire. 0. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44180533 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44180533 1. https://equitablegrowth.org/aftermath-wage-collusion-silicon-valley/ https://equitablegrowth.org/aftermath-wage-collusion-silicon...
- nizbit 1y ago
  Queuing Gattaca dystopian future…
- mmcromp 1y ago
  "AI will kill white collar, those people should just go into trades, they can become plumbers". Great idea, except that's not how supply/demand works. AI didn't create the need for more toilets.
  - panarchy 1y ago
    "AI didn't create the need for more toilets." It does generate a lot of shit...
paul7986 1y ago
I am UX Researcher, Designer and UI Developer. Up until a week ago (company gave permission to use GPT) per some tests I did (personally) with GPT i thought indeed it can do my job yet as of today and using GPT 5... Logo & Graphic Creation.... - Does this the best so far, but asking it to edit a graphic it created / you liked it doesn't always do what you asked. So, playing with GPT to get it right vs. taking what it initially gave you (same as going to a stock photo site and finding graphics to manipulate) and opening Photoshop is still same amount of time. So here GPT is just another stock photo site like resource yet can take TIME to generate. Is it pulling from a stock site anyway? - Web Design On your first attempt to ask it to create a solid web design it works good yet asking it to make edits to it forget lol. It will go and create totally new design and at times on the first attempt it chooses to create a design with a width of 800px (cutting off the left and right sides of the full design). Front-End Coding... It does not host images and or provide an entire zip of a website it coded. My Front-End skills are still needed until it provides a zip and handles images properly! UX Research... These skills I feel are safest from AI as it requires interfacing with users!
5350-uiop-1130 1y ago
so what happens when blue collar jobs get saturated? looking forward to the Learn2Plumb bootcamps on HN all these type articles do is manufacture consent for layoffs
dweekly 1y ago
Mentioned in the article text, but not the title, is the fact that blue collar work typically does not require a college degree. You can start getting paid immediately after high school. Contrasted with a possible alternate path of four to five years of undergrad at a third tier college paying $80k/yr and financed at an 11% APR... The real secular arc here predating the GenAI rush has been the decreasing ROI of a generic college degree.
- safety1st 1y ago
  Another interesting thing in the article, that also isn't in the headline, is a link to Goldman Sachs' assessment of how much AI is actually threatening office work: "Despite concerns about widespread job losses, AI adoption is expected to have only a modest and relatively temporary impact on employment levels. Goldman Sachs Research estimates that unemployment will increase by half a percentage point during the AI transition period as displaced workers seek new positions."
VincentEvans 1y ago
Who are these trades going to sell their services to when a large proportion of people employed in white collar work are looking at a prospect of reduced income or loss of jobs?
- jackcosgrove 1y ago
  The economy functioned without large numbers of office workers in the past, and there are regions of the country where this is still the case. To an extent they will sell their services to each other. To another extent they will be selling to the owners of AI (imagine an electrician building out a data center). The economic surplus will still be there - it will be larger in fact - and there will still be a need for their services. The players involved will change however.
  - VincentEvans 1y ago
    “In the past” trades did not enjoy nearly the income levels they do now. The rise in demand for their services and corresponding raise in their compensation are linked to the wealth of the other half of the economy.
panarchy 1y ago
When I see stories like this all I can think of is that rich people must really hate paying their blue collar workers market value and want to flood the market to lower their wages and bargaining ability. Especially when I hear how hard it is to actually get a proper blue collar job (that isn't just a manual labor with a bit of carpentry job paying below a living wage) and be apprenticed in it from my blue collar friends.
- noobdevv 1y ago
  Ding ding!
api 1y ago
We overcorrected toward white collar work. Now it’s time for us to overcorrect toward blue collar work.
lotyrin 1y ago
The problem with Blue-collar work under AI is that your white collar AI manager can fork itself and have infinite time to micromanage you. I foresee people being asked to wear AR glasses and/or work in a digital camera panopticon to be constantly evaluated on performance and compliance with (disconnected and disaffected) policy (imagine if your checkbox-first-results-never corporate compliance officer can design new checkboxes 100x as fast as a human one could have). When the machines can real-time analyze and provide "corrective" feedback or "training" to a pool of juniors who don't feel like they deserve rights or pay and have never even heard of a union, the value of skill in labor drops to nothing, and only people who are able to perform blind obedience will be valuable in the market. If management is infinite heartless machines chasing profit motive, then every job becomes Amazon Fulfillment on steroids. No-one will be spared.
- SoftTalker 1y ago
  Why do you think they would not hear about unions?
  - pilooch 1y ago
    Because they'd never hire, but subcontract down to the bone.
    - quickthrowman 1y ago
      Plenty of large companies only hire union contractors for electrical, mechanical, and plumbing systems (aka skilled trades, or trades that can damage a building if installation is done poorly)
- Gud 1y ago
  If you say so. I will continue to get shit done and get paid well. You take care of the checkboxes mate
- insane_dreamer 1y ago
  > I foresee people being asked to wear AR glasses and/or work in a digital camera panopticon to be constantly evaluated on performance and compliance with (disconnected and disaffected) policy No need to foresee; this is already happening. Remote surveillance of work performed, with an AI determining, based on realtime video or photos, whether you performed the job correctly or not. Some companies are doing this now, particularly in industries where it's expensive to send someone out to fix something if it wasn't done exactly right the first time. But it's easily applied all down the line.
anovikov 1y ago
The safest are the licensed professions because numbers of new entrants are regulated by cartel and people won't be able to let go of the demand because again, regulations. Simply put, safest jobs will be red-taped sinecures.
password321 1y ago
These always come with the assumption that most white-collar jobs weren't already mostly performative busywork.
- mmcromp 1y ago
  Blue collar has plenty of performative busywork too
noosphr 1y ago
People are going to be surprised when the cheap humanoid robots out of China get paired with transformer models for planning and control. I got a bit caught with my pants down between GPT2, which was so hyped, and GPT3.5 which was also hyped but the delta between reality and Sam's bullshit was much smaller. I've been keeping my eye out on both the hardware and software and we're in the pre-gpt2 days for robotics right now. There's a lot of cute little results that need a few million dollars to get put together. The next 5 years will make the effect of transformers on office work since 2022 seem like a slight breeze compared to a tornado.
HarHarVeryFunny 1y ago
I think it'll be a while (10-20 years?) until we have AGI good enough to at least potentially replace a non-trivial number of workers as opposed to just being a productivity tool. LLMs are clearly just a tool. We will of course eventually create human-level AGI, but things like emotions and empathy will come later, if at all, which may limit its utility in interacting with humans and therefore usefulness for many jobs. The major job categories that AGI might be capable of is "professional and business" office jobs and many government jobs, which each account for about 15% of US jobs, but what that leaves is the other 70% which includes not only "blue collar" jobs such as trades, manufacturing, construction, transportation, but also major employers such as healthcare, education, leisure & hospitality, etc. The future doesn't always turn out as expected though, especially when it comes to sci-fi visions of people in flying cars, living on mars, etc. AGI and robotics may well turn out to be the same - we may imagine humanoid robots and human-like "remote workers" doing many jobs, but it'll probably not be like that. Humanoid workers are probably about as likely as flying cars - problematic and just not that useful. AGI "workers" may well be just agents that are given well defined tasks to execute as opposed to fully autonomous human worker replacements.
tsunamifury 1y ago
Did anyone RTFA. The damn sub head literally contradicts the title as clickbait and admits it’s false.
rchaud 1y ago
This is another recycled version of the "college is a scam" trope that comes around during every recession. I first experienced it firsthand when I graduated smack dab in the middle of the Great Recession of 2008-09. Those who had majored in the so-called "basket weaving" disciplines were doomed, while those in "job-ready" disciplines like comp sci, accounting and finance were also doomed, but marginally less so as they'd bounce back when the S&P500 did. It's far too simple to say "train to be a plumber" or HVAC, construction, or auto mechanic or whatever people latch on to as "future-proof / recession-proof". The reluctance to take these jobs is not the resistance to doing manual labour, but that lifetime income is limited unless you're the boss. As with any role in a broadly non-unionized labour market, you only make proper money if you incorporate, strike deals of your own, hire people and pay yourself multiples more than the labour. Otherwise, your time, labour and frankly, bodily integrity is at the mercy of whoever signs your paychecks. And just like every other industry, only a small proportion of workers are cut out to be biz dev or people managers, and as a boss, you need to be able to do both. Demand for electricians or mechanics will not grow proportionately with growth in electrician training programs, any more than SW Eng jobs did with the growth of bootcamps in the 2010s. The difference was that coding jobs were often paid for on the back of venture capital, or on the back of a giant, profitable corporation. The trades are not like that, you can't be paid more than what the company brings in revenue-wise.
- noobdevv 1y ago
  Similar story here, learned to program during the dotcom bust. Everyone including Scott Adams was obsessed with tech being a dead end because of offshoring to India. Starting in mid-00's with no education at 18, I've never had to worry about money or a job. Maybe offshoring made a difference but do I care? Especially early on, companies were thrilled to find someone local who wanted to and was able to code. Just like they're blown away recently by someone who can work without ChatGPT and isn't in the field because mommy made them do it. It's incredible how little things change. But sure, go become plumber, lord knows I need one sometimes.

62 points by geox 1y ago

Given the degree to which knowledge workers dominate politics, the rush to erect legal barriers to AI adoption is going to be rapid. It’s already happening: https://idfpr.illinois.gov/news/2025/gov-pritzker-signs-state-leg-prohibiting-ai-therapy-in-il.html https://idfpr.illinois.gov/news/2025/gov-pritzker-signs-stat...

billy99k 1y ago
It just means countries like China will offer these services and gain an advantage over the US.
- stego-tech 1y ago
  Except not really, as evidenced by China hamstringing private rollout of AI tools like facial recognition or data-based surveillance and retaining those solely for the government’s use. They know that whatever issues the US is grappling with now, they’re not too far behind, and they have the added benefit of learning from our mistakes. Governments have as much to fear from mass labor displacement as they do to gain from AI-turbocharged surveillance and warfare. It’s why competent regimes will tighten rules to stem or stop unnecessary bleeding and preserve their power.
fennecbutt 1y ago
Too little too late. I mean we all deserve it tbh, apathetic tribal species.
techpineapple 1y ago
AI therapy is hardly a good example of trying to erect barriers to AI adoption. I don’t think they’re trying to protect practitioners they’re trying to protect patients. I will be absolutely shocked if there is any real attempt to regulate AI adoption. Capitalists gotta capital.
- JamesBarney 1y ago
  Who do you think is spending money lobbying politicians to ban this? Do you think it's a depressed patients activist group who is scared someone might try to sell them a cheap always available AI therapist? Or do you think it's a therapist group who just so happens to be pushing for barriers that protect their jobs while gaslighting themselves into thinking it's to protect their patients.
  - techpineapple 1y ago
    The first. No one gives a fuck about workers. I hope I’m wrong by the way, nothing would make me happier than LLm’s being regulated out of existence.
givemeethekeys 1y ago
Yes, just like we rushed to forming unions! /s Unfortunately I don’t think meritocracy and protectionism make for good roommates inside white collar brains.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
pydry 1y ago
Workers do not dominate politics in any way, shape or form. Owners do.
- rayiner 1y ago
  Society has multiple classes with distinct interests. It’s not just “owners versus workers.” In the U.S., the top 0.1% own about 14% of the wealth, but most of the rest is owned by the top 25% outside the top 0.1%. Within this class there is a spectrum of “ownership.” Tim Cook is technically a worker, but he has “owner” wealth. But he came into that wealth by being a worker—he never risked his own capital to start a business, nor did he inherit assets. This is especially true for knowledge work, where putative workers typically are non-fungible in ways that give them a great deal of leverage with owners.
  - pydry 1y ago
    Society does have multiple classes, yes but one in particular dominates politics - the ownership class. See here for the relevant study: https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-echochambers-27074746 https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-echochambers-27074746
    - rayiner 1y ago
      That study defines “elite” as the top 10% of income earners, which is mostly skilled and knowledge workers, not owners. I can’t access the PDF but there was a reddit thread about the methodology: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskSocialScience/comments/73nbuv/in_testing_theories_of_american_politics_elites/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=mweb3x&utm_name=mweb3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button https://www.reddit.com/r/AskSocialScience/comments/73nbuv/in.... So that is consistent with my point that knowledge workers have lots of political power. Also, Vox did a piece discussing subsequent research that suggests that whatever effect Gilens and Page are seeing is relatively weak: https://www.vox.com/2016/5/9/11502464/gilens-page-oligarchy-study https://www.vox.com/2016/5/9/11502464/gilens-page-oligarchy-.... I suspect you’d find a stronger correlation if you compared knowledge workers versus blue collar workers (I.e. accounted for the fact that you have fairly affluent tradespeople and medium income knowledge workers, like entry level folks who work in marketing).
intended 1y ago
Blanket characterization of regulation, as malicious barriers to AI adoption, creates the perfect smoke screen to deflect discussion of the actual problems we are seeing. The law you linked to prohibits firms from using AI to provide therapy, this doesn’t stop people from doing it anyway. It’s a far cry from saying that knowledge workers are rushing to erect legal barriers to AI adoption. A large number of knowledge workers are busy trying to increase adoption of AI, a behavior at odds with your claim. That this argument is made, in a forum populated by knowledge workers, is ironic.
- JamesBarney 1y ago
  What problem does preventing companies from providing AI back mental health services does this legislation provide except? > protecting the jobs of Illinois’ thousands of qualified behavioral health providers
  - intended 1y ago
    Are you unaware that genAI tools reaffirm beliefs of people in manic or delusional states?
lurk2 1y ago
Most professional services already have a moat around them in that you need to be licensed in order to practice the profession; AI can’t disrupt these industries because A) after three years, the hallucination issue has not improved and B) the AI itself can’t legally perform most of the services a licensed professional is permitted to provide. It’s easy to write off this sort of regulation as economic protectionism if you’re a true believer in the technology, but from personal experience, the LLMs I have used are only really good for solving well-understood programming problems and doing what Google used to do 10 years ago. You can maybe use them to power some blackhat marketing efforts but most of what I’ve seen there are just run-of-the-mill spam operations that have discovered Reddit.
beepbooptheory 1y ago
What level of institutional and cultural acceptance, de jure or de facto, would be needed to make you feel otherwise here? Like on its face, looking around the world, this sentiment feels absurd right now. We are moving mountains to build this stuff up. AI is not the lowly underdog here, it is immediately the top of the food chain. If things are not moving fast enough for you, that feels more like personal contradiction you are working through here. Like it almost sounds like you want this to be the 90s again and be a Cypherpunk advocating for cause, but you look around and actually you're already the suits, the feds; you're on top, and the virtuous fight for freedom was null and void from the start. So all you can do is force yourself into feeling like a victim always already. September was too short!
insane_dreamer 1y ago
> knowledge workers^H^H^H^H^H^Howners dominate politics fixed it for you

billy99k 1y ago

My cousin was a software engineer for two decades. He got laid off and couldn't find a job for two years. He's now a mechanic.

mmcromp 1y ago
How does he feel about that? how long did his apprenticeship last, did even need one or did he have an "in"? How does his pay relate to old software work? How is the toll on his body? Does he think he can keep doing it into old age?

bm3719 1y ago

Our gestating Machine God doesn't yet have hands as good as ours, so good this is good advice. We had a system of overproduction of sentient office equipment, who waste their time on pointless Zoom calls and sending emails that no one reads. That had to end sooner or later, and was already about to collapse on its own. BS job holders are miserable anyway. Let's give these people purpose (closing the gap between activity and tangible output), free them from debt-slavery, and fix all the broken infrastructure around us.

jappgar 1y ago
The idea that aging office workers can learn to weld is even dumber than thinking aging welders can learn to code.
- jMyles 1y ago
  ...neither of those sound the least bit dumb to me.
  - intended 1y ago
    Which is why theres evidence that it doesn’t work to help us learn from the mistakes of the past.
- tomrod 1y ago
  Welding is not hard to learn. It just takes practice.
  - dare944 1y ago
    Nope. Try TIG on aluminum or titanium. I will never be able to do this well enough to get certified because, simply put, I'm well past my prime dexterity years. But I can still write some damn fine embedded code.
Rover222 1y ago
Tesla Optimus hands are iterating rapidly and are already incredible. I know it’s taboo to claim anything positive about any Musk company. But Optimus is coming. To fold my laundry and do my dishes. And maybe one day strip some wires.

stego-tech 1y ago

I mean, good? We need more tradespeople than we do office workers - and we need everyone in both fields to be paid substantially more than they presently earn, which will only come about through new business creation, something tradespeople dominate. Software engineers won’t power the green energy transformation so much as skilled electricians, architects, contractors, and builders. More finance people won’t replace aging and inefficient infrastructure so much as more road workers, pipe fitters, plumbers, and wastewater engineers. I think the current (over)hype around LLMs replacing jobs wholesale is an excellent catalyst for this shift, but I also acknowledge that the pendulum was already naturally swinging that way after decades of over-prioritizing white collar work as the only means of joining the shrinking middle class.

mmcromp 1y ago
What makes you think we need more trades people?
- tomrod 1y ago
  Whst makes you think we don't?
  - mmcromp 1y ago
    Because I'm from working class, rust belt and ive seen the reality the state of America blue collar, not just the "the guy who installed my TV said he owns his own business and makes almost as much as me working in software" fantasy. I've also had a front row seat to "just learn JavaScript" go from great career advice to joke in the span of time it'd take you to finish a trade apprenticeship.
eszed 1y ago
Agreed. If this also raises the social status of blue collar work / workers - I mean that someone with a college degree won't feel ashamed to work in the trades, or that, say, a diesel mechanic wouldn't feel out of place at a book club - this will also be a positive development.

CapitalistCartr 1y ago

I'm an industrial electrician. I have zero fears of being replaced by any any sort of AI. Maybe by someone younger and smarter, but I have 38 years experience. The trades are a decent living, and lots of people could do worse.

Rover222 1y ago
My grandpa was a master electrician. My father was a master electrician. I am a software engineer. I am sweating. I feel like we have another 2 or 3 years and then it might be over. I will go work in the mines.
frankdorr35 1y ago
Same here, however with the new meta glasses or the augmented reality glasses you're going to see people with no knowledge of our field actually troubleshooting machines with technicians remotely. They will be paid a lot less than us.
- i_am_proteus 1y ago
  I wonder who will be held at fault when the low-paid in-person troubleshooter discovers 15kV with his fingers (I do not wonder who will be killed) while his lock opens the wrong breaker. The business is not broken and does not need "fixing."
  - techpineapple 1y ago
    > The business is not broken and does not need "fixing." Welcome to tech, that’s what we do here.
  - idkwhattocallme 1y ago
    But it is broken. There is a shortage of every type of trades worker. Sure it's been great for existing trade folks because there are plenty of jobs and the pay is great more demand than supply. But the lack of supply has meant that it's too expensive to build/fix stuff. If you're in the US look around. It looks like we literally stopped building in the 1950s. Every renovation/building project is multi-year. Why? The lack of plentiful skilled trades people is one of the reasons the US building and infrastructure are deteriorating.

techpineapple 1y ago

Something that bugs me about all these articles. It’s all bullshit. Almost any future is possible at this point and the data can be analyzed in almost any way. Could be AI, could be the economy, could be vibes. You’ll just get stupider reading all this shit.

jimbohn 1y ago
A huge problem of articles in general is that they are made to entertain you rather than inform you because of ad-driven incentives. It's indeed all bullshit.

tolerance 1y ago

I wonder what effects this will have in the long run, as people attuned to white-collar labor and culture begin to assume jobs usually held by people who aren’t...

sciencesama 1y ago

wait till robots come for their jobs !

techpineapple 1y ago

I generally don’t believe in Panacea’s, and if these jobs were so great and the solution to all our problems, why is it when we live in a country where a large percentage of folks are rural or otherwise have blue collar values, there not pursuing them? Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying all blue collar jobs are bad, many are fantastic! But like all things, it’s likely a pyramid. Just like a lot of software engineering jobs are shitty. If it is offered as a panacea, then the glut of applicants will just drive down wages.

charliebwrites 1y ago

An interesting thing about blue collar work, especially when you’re your own boss, is that when things get more expensive, you can raise your rates When you have a salary, you’re getting paid what you’re getting paid and nothing more and hoping whatever raise might come is better than inflation

1123581321 1y ago
What percentage of blue collar workers are self-employed compared to white collar workers?
- SoftTalker 1y ago
  I would guess higher but it's based on personal experience. Compared to freelance software devs, I know a lot more "sole proprietor" handymen type guys, i.e. they specialize in bathroom and kitchen renovations, or other "home improvement" jobs that one guy can do by himself or maybe with a helper. The real tradesmen (plumbers, electricians, etc.) will often start their own businesses, especially once they get to know and be known by the local contractors, and end up doing bigger new construction jobs with dozens of employees. The comparable white-collar version of this would be the experienced developer or marketer who starts their own consultancy or agency. I think it would be more rare to see a true "start up" in the blue collar world. Most of their work is regulated by code and there isn't as much room to compete on innovation, you have to compete on reputation and experience and that can't be substituted by VC money.

lordnacho 1y ago

A lot of blue-collar jobs require apprenticeships. You can read complaints in several countries about how hard it is to find one.

mtoner23 1y ago
agreed, the trades intentionally restrict who can become trained. its the reason they are called trades in the first place. restrict labor supply to pump up their own wages
dgb23 1y ago
Switzerland and Germany have very good systems for apprenticeships. However, one of the challenges is to find them as you said. Apprentices typically start at a young age (16) and you have wildly different levels of maturity there. Another issue is that many jobs aren’t attractive to locals (anymore), and immigrants fight the uphill battle of having to learn the language, culture etc.
tmm 1y ago
And a long one at that. I’m sure I could do well as an electrician eventually, but there’s no way I could make it through 4+ years as an apprentice making $21/hr, and then another three as a journeyman (even if it pays double). Maybe when my house is paid off (but who’s going to hire a 50yr old apprentice?). The biggest problem with an apprenticeship model is that it creates a bottleneck to getting people into the trades. You need competent journeymen (and knowing the trade isn’t enough, they need to be able to teach) who ideally can take on more than one apprentice at a time. But no matter how much everyone “wants young people in the trades” and no matter how much of a “shortage of tradespeople” there is, the bigger shortage is apprentice positions. Every kid in the world could suddenly decide they want to be electricians and plumbers, and it would still take two generations to fill the ranks. Note that I’m mostly focusing on trades that require state licensing. Laborers, carpenters, painters, plasterers, welders, etc. don’t suffer this problem as much, because there is no set amount of time for someone to be an apprentice. If you’re good and reliable you’re getting promoted fast. I’m not against licensing per se, but I am strongly against legislated work requirements for a job. I know I could study for a week and pass the master electrician exam on Monday.

shit_game 1y ago

Blue collar jobs are only going to be the go-to for as long as the labor supply is lower than the commercial demand, which I doubt will be long (if this is even the case now). It takes a non-neglible amount of time to train (or certify) for these jobs in much of the western world, which means that any bump in demand is met with a significant lag in supply. Once that supply catches up, the momentum of people saying "bro just go to trade school instead of college, plumbers/electricians/welders/dirt farmers make $100k" is going to dump thousands and thousands of juniors into a market that will very quickly oversaturate. We are witnessing this at an accelerated rate with software development and other tech jobs, largely due to extreme external factors (high interest rates limiting VC cash flow, Trump's hostile domestic economic policies[0], demonstrable downward pressure on employment mobility and wage suppression from big tech[1]). The american "middle class" is still shrinking, but now it's shrinking faster than ever before, largely because the capital class wants more money, and there is one more stone to bleed. Creating a market of blue collar professionals who will be blackballed from white collar markets due to their educational and work histories (in tandem with the desired outcome of using AI workloads for these jobs in lieu of people) will raise the commercial value of these white collar services, while gatekeeping their entry and stagnating/lowering their compensation. The ladder is being set on fire. 0. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44180533 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44180533 1. https://equitablegrowth.org/aftermath-wage-collusion-silicon-valley/ https://equitablegrowth.org/aftermath-wage-collusion-silicon...

nizbit 1y ago
Queuing Gattaca dystopian future…
mmcromp 1y ago
"AI will kill white collar, those people should just go into trades, they can become plumbers". Great idea, except that's not how supply/demand works. AI didn't create the need for more toilets.
- panarchy 1y ago
  "AI didn't create the need for more toilets." It does generate a lot of shit...

paul7986 1y ago

I am UX Researcher, Designer and UI Developer. Up until a week ago (company gave permission to use GPT) per some tests I did (personally) with GPT i thought indeed it can do my job yet as of today and using GPT 5... Logo & Graphic Creation.... - Does this the best so far, but asking it to edit a graphic it created / you liked it doesn't always do what you asked. So, playing with GPT to get it right vs. taking what it initially gave you (same as going to a stock photo site and finding graphics to manipulate) and opening Photoshop is still same amount of time. So here GPT is just another stock photo site like resource yet can take TIME to generate. Is it pulling from a stock site anyway? - Web Design On your first attempt to ask it to create a solid web design it works good yet asking it to make edits to it forget lol. It will go and create totally new design and at times on the first attempt it chooses to create a design with a width of 800px (cutting off the left and right sides of the full design). Front-End Coding... It does not host images and or provide an entire zip of a website it coded. My Front-End skills are still needed until it provides a zip and handles images properly! UX Research... These skills I feel are safest from AI as it requires interfacing with users!

5350-uiop-1130 1y ago

so what happens when blue collar jobs get saturated? looking forward to the Learn2Plumb bootcamps on HN all these type articles do is manufacture consent for layoffs

dweekly 1y ago

Mentioned in the article text, but not the title, is the fact that blue collar work typically does not require a college degree. You can start getting paid immediately after high school. Contrasted with a possible alternate path of four to five years of undergrad at a third tier college paying $80k/yr and financed at an 11% APR... The real secular arc here predating the GenAI rush has been the decreasing ROI of a generic college degree.

safety1st 1y ago
Another interesting thing in the article, that also isn't in the headline, is a link to Goldman Sachs' assessment of how much AI is actually threatening office work: "Despite concerns about widespread job losses, AI adoption is expected to have only a modest and relatively temporary impact on employment levels. Goldman Sachs Research estimates that unemployment will increase by half a percentage point during the AI transition period as displaced workers seek new positions."

VincentEvans 1y ago

Who are these trades going to sell their services to when a large proportion of people employed in white collar work are looking at a prospect of reduced income or loss of jobs?

jackcosgrove 1y ago
The economy functioned without large numbers of office workers in the past, and there are regions of the country where this is still the case. To an extent they will sell their services to each other. To another extent they will be selling to the owners of AI (imagine an electrician building out a data center). The economic surplus will still be there - it will be larger in fact - and there will still be a need for their services. The players involved will change however.
- VincentEvans 1y ago
  “In the past” trades did not enjoy nearly the income levels they do now. The rise in demand for their services and corresponding raise in their compensation are linked to the wealth of the other half of the economy.

panarchy 1y ago

When I see stories like this all I can think of is that rich people must really hate paying their blue collar workers market value and want to flood the market to lower their wages and bargaining ability. Especially when I hear how hard it is to actually get a proper blue collar job (that isn't just a manual labor with a bit of carpentry job paying below a living wage) and be apprenticed in it from my blue collar friends.

noobdevv 1y ago
Ding ding!

api 1y ago

We overcorrected toward white collar work. Now it’s time for us to overcorrect toward blue collar work.

lotyrin 1y ago

The problem with Blue-collar work under AI is that your white collar AI manager can fork itself and have infinite time to micromanage you. I foresee people being asked to wear AR glasses and/or work in a digital camera panopticon to be constantly evaluated on performance and compliance with (disconnected and disaffected) policy (imagine if your checkbox-first-results-never corporate compliance officer can design new checkboxes 100x as fast as a human one could have). When the machines can real-time analyze and provide "corrective" feedback or "training" to a pool of juniors who don't feel like they deserve rights or pay and have never even heard of a union, the value of skill in labor drops to nothing, and only people who are able to perform blind obedience will be valuable in the market. If management is infinite heartless machines chasing profit motive, then every job becomes Amazon Fulfillment on steroids. No-one will be spared.

SoftTalker 1y ago
Why do you think they would not hear about unions?
- pilooch 1y ago
  Because they'd never hire, but subcontract down to the bone.
  - quickthrowman 1y ago
    Plenty of large companies only hire union contractors for electrical, mechanical, and plumbing systems (aka skilled trades, or trades that can damage a building if installation is done poorly)
Gud 1y ago
If you say so. I will continue to get shit done and get paid well. You take care of the checkboxes mate
insane_dreamer 1y ago
> I foresee people being asked to wear AR glasses and/or work in a digital camera panopticon to be constantly evaluated on performance and compliance with (disconnected and disaffected) policy No need to foresee; this is already happening. Remote surveillance of work performed, with an AI determining, based on realtime video or photos, whether you performed the job correctly or not. Some companies are doing this now, particularly in industries where it's expensive to send someone out to fix something if it wasn't done exactly right the first time. But it's easily applied all down the line.

anovikov 1y ago

The safest are the licensed professions because numbers of new entrants are regulated by cartel and people won't be able to let go of the demand because again, regulations. Simply put, safest jobs will be red-taped sinecures.

password321 1y ago

These always come with the assumption that most white-collar jobs weren't already mostly performative busywork.

mmcromp 1y ago
Blue collar has plenty of performative busywork too

noosphr 1y ago

People are going to be surprised when the cheap humanoid robots out of China get paired with transformer models for planning and control. I got a bit caught with my pants down between GPT2, which was so hyped, and GPT3.5 which was also hyped but the delta between reality and Sam's bullshit was much smaller. I've been keeping my eye out on both the hardware and software and we're in the pre-gpt2 days for robotics right now. There's a lot of cute little results that need a few million dollars to get put together. The next 5 years will make the effect of transformers on office work since 2022 seem like a slight breeze compared to a tornado.

HarHarVeryFunny 1y ago

I think it'll be a while (10-20 years?) until we have AGI good enough to at least potentially replace a non-trivial number of workers as opposed to just being a productivity tool. LLMs are clearly just a tool. We will of course eventually create human-level AGI, but things like emotions and empathy will come later, if at all, which may limit its utility in interacting with humans and therefore usefulness for many jobs. The major job categories that AGI might be capable of is "professional and business" office jobs and many government jobs, which each account for about 15% of US jobs, but what that leaves is the other 70% which includes not only "blue collar" jobs such as trades, manufacturing, construction, transportation, but also major employers such as healthcare, education, leisure & hospitality, etc. The future doesn't always turn out as expected though, especially when it comes to sci-fi visions of people in flying cars, living on mars, etc. AGI and robotics may well turn out to be the same - we may imagine humanoid robots and human-like "remote workers" doing many jobs, but it'll probably not be like that. Humanoid workers are probably about as likely as flying cars - problematic and just not that useful. AGI "workers" may well be just agents that are given well defined tasks to execute as opposed to fully autonomous human worker replacements.

tsunamifury 1y ago

Did anyone RTFA. The damn sub head literally contradicts the title as clickbait and admits it’s false.

rchaud 1y ago

This is another recycled version of the "college is a scam" trope that comes around during every recession. I first experienced it firsthand when I graduated smack dab in the middle of the Great Recession of 2008-09. Those who had majored in the so-called "basket weaving" disciplines were doomed, while those in "job-ready" disciplines like comp sci, accounting and finance were also doomed, but marginally less so as they'd bounce back when the S&P500 did. It's far too simple to say "train to be a plumber" or HVAC, construction, or auto mechanic or whatever people latch on to as "future-proof / recession-proof". The reluctance to take these jobs is not the resistance to doing manual labour, but that lifetime income is limited unless you're the boss. As with any role in a broadly non-unionized labour market, you only make proper money if you incorporate, strike deals of your own, hire people and pay yourself multiples more than the labour. Otherwise, your time, labour and frankly, bodily integrity is at the mercy of whoever signs your paychecks. And just like every other industry, only a small proportion of workers are cut out to be biz dev or people managers, and as a boss, you need to be able to do both. Demand for electricians or mechanics will not grow proportionately with growth in electrician training programs, any more than SW Eng jobs did with the growth of bootcamps in the 2010s. The difference was that coding jobs were often paid for on the back of venture capital, or on the back of a giant, profitable corporation. The trades are not like that, you can't be paid more than what the company brings in revenue-wise.

noobdevv 1y ago
Similar story here, learned to program during the dotcom bust. Everyone including Scott Adams was obsessed with tech being a dead end because of offshoring to India. Starting in mid-00's with no education at 18, I've never had to worry about money or a job. Maybe offshoring made a difference but do I care? Especially early on, companies were thrilled to find someone local who wanted to and was able to code. Just like they're blown away recently by someone who can work without ChatGPT and isn't in the field because mommy made them do it. It's incredible how little things change. But sure, go become plumber, lord knows I need one sometimes.