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 · 6m ago
Why do you think they would not hear about unions?
CapitalistCartr · 37m 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.
Uehreka · 16m ago
> The trades are a decent living, and lots of people could do worse.
I sure hope this remains true after the number of people trying to become electricians quintuples in size.
I feel like in a lot of these discussions, people think about themselves first and go “I’ll just become an electrician if my white collar job goes away, how bad could it be?” But then you need to realize that many many people are going to have this problem, and the phrasing “Well, we’ll all just become electricians if our white collar jobs go away.” doesn’t have the same ring to it.
It’s not enough for there to EXIST non-automatable jobs. The demand for those jobs must be so massive that a gigantic number of currently well-paid people can take jobs in the sector without massively depressing wages.
dzink · 2m ago
The big upside here is that more web designers make more web sites, but more electricians and crafts people make more houses eventually (whatever is most valuable) and we can use more of that.
nopinsight · 9m ago
Humans being what they are, there's still a tremendous amount of work to do in this world (and beyond).
Does everyone alive already have the best quality of life imaginable, not to mention future generations?
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 · 22m 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."
idkwhattocallme · 6m 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 · 19m ago
> The business is not broken and does not need "fixing."
Welcome to tech, that’s what we do here.
password321 · 56s ago
These always come with the assumption that most white-collar jobs weren't already mostly performative busywork.
lordnacho · 25m 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 · 20m 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
dweekly · 20m 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 · 17m 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."
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.
lurk2 · 16m 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.
fennecbutt · 45m ago
Too little too late. I mean we all deserve it tbh, apathetic tribal species.
pydry · 28m ago
Workers do not dominate politics in any way, shape or form. Owners do.
rayiner · 18m 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.
techpineapple · 39m 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.
givemeethekeys · 31m 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.
billy99k · 48m ago
It just means countries like China will offer these services and gain an advantage over the US.
stego-tech · 42m 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.
VincentEvans · 19m 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 · 4m 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.
charliebwrites · 27m 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 · 19m ago
What percentage of blue collar workers are self-employed compared to white collar workers?
bm3719 · 48m 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 · 43m ago
The idea that aging office workers can learn to weld is even dumber than thinking aging welders can learn to code.
jMyles · 24m ago
...neither of those sound the least bit dumb to me.
intended · 21m ago
Which is why theres evidence that it doesn’t work to help us learn from the mistakes of the past.
anovikov · 2m 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.
billy99k · 53m 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.
panarchy · 19m 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.
techpineapple · 27m 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.
stego-tech · 45m 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.
eszed · 38m 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.
intended · 12m ago
This doesn’t raise the status of blue collar workers because there are only so many plumbing jobs out there.
Don’t get me wrong - The trades are good, and were simply not “sexy” for a long while.
There was a reason people wanted their kids to do white collar work. Trades are dependent on economic cycles, and work can dry up. It’s also manual labor, which takes a toll on you physically.
In the end - neither white collar nor blue collar matter much, since neither guarantee a retirement anymore. The AI job apocalypse (if it happens) will be taking out the last life boat left standing.
We had manufacturing to move people from agrarian work to middle class life. That’s gone - automation has gotten to the point of lights out manufacturing. This has left only services.
Ps: I doubt AI will actually be the powerhouse it is being hailed as. There is a different between an MVP and having to maintain technical debt.
stego-tech · 37m ago
Agreed. If you have to work for a living, you’re part of the same class as everyone else - and just as capable of intelligence, empathy, and accomplishment. Metaphorical collar colors are irrelevant.
shit_game · 24m 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.
We overcorrected toward white collar work. Now it’s time for us to overcorrect toward blue collar work.
tolerance · 30m 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...
tropicalfruit · 20m 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
techpineapple · 37m 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.
sciencesama · 29m ago
wait till robots come for their jobs !
paul7986 · 23m 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.
- 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!
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.
I sure hope this remains true after the number of people trying to become electricians quintuples in size.
I feel like in a lot of these discussions, people think about themselves first and go “I’ll just become an electrician if my white collar job goes away, how bad could it be?” But then you need to realize that many many people are going to have this problem, and the phrasing “Well, we’ll all just become electricians if our white collar jobs go away.” doesn’t have the same ring to it.
It’s not enough for there to EXIST non-automatable jobs. The demand for those jobs must be so massive that a gigantic number of currently well-paid people can take jobs in the sector without massively depressing wages.
Does everyone alive already have the best quality of life imaginable, not to mention future generations?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lump_of_labour_fallacy
Also, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_advantage
The business is not broken and does not need "fixing."
Welcome to tech, that’s what we do here.
The real secular arc here predating the GenAI rush has been the decreasing ROI of a generic college degree.
"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."
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.
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.
I will be absolutely shocked if there is any real attempt to regulate AI adoption. Capitalists gotta capital.
Unfortunately I don’t think meritocracy and protectionism make for good roommates inside white collar brains.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Don’t get me wrong - The trades are good, and were simply not “sexy” for a long while.
There was a reason people wanted their kids to do white collar work. Trades are dependent on economic cycles, and work can dry up. It’s also manual labor, which takes a toll on you physically.
In the end - neither white collar nor blue collar matter much, since neither guarantee a retirement anymore. The AI job apocalypse (if it happens) will be taking out the last life boat left standing.
We had manufacturing to move people from agrarian work to middle class life. That’s gone - automation has gotten to the point of lights out manufacturing. This has left only services.
Ps: I doubt AI will actually be the powerhouse it is being hailed as. There is a different between an MVP and having to maintain technical debt.
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 1. https://equitablegrowth.org/aftermath-wage-collusion-silicon...
looking forward to the Learn2Plumb bootcamps on HN
all these type articles do is manufacture consent for layoffs
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.
- 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!