I think that by the time AI can fully automate software engineering, it will be able to fully automate physical electrical work. The challenge in both cases is

I think that by the time AI can fully automate software engineering, it will be able to fully automate physical electrical work. The challenge in both cases is all the invisible, hard-to-describe stuff that people are doing which business people take for granted. Business people don't consider "minimizing complexity" to be something software engineers do, but it's literally the most important part of the job for any large complex project and it's almost impossible to measure. Even humans are pretty bad at it but at least there is a limit. With AI, there is no awareness of this and more complexity means more tokens to sell today and in the future to maintain so there is a perverse incentive and no guardrails. Also, software engineers make a lot of decisions based on human factors and factors that are unique to the company/project. For electricians, the part which AI struggles to automate is robotics and stuff like travelling to the job location, ensuring the right cables are available, identifying the right port to plug the cables into, drilling holes if necessary, climbing into the ceiling, pulling rolls of cables along the ceiling or wall with appropriate attachments, setting up the electrical boxes. I think in the near future, all manual jobs will be replaced by a combination of specialist robots and generalist "human minders"; a minder will be transferrable across any industry and the entire job will be exception handling any unexpected issues which the engineers didn't yet train or program into the specialist robots.