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Comment by Spooky23 | Hacker News Reader

Absolutely.

The billable rate for journeyman auto mechanics is $100/hr. Simultaneously, we have a massive and growing glut of trained attorneys earning nothing.

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I think you just pointed out the problem with vocational education. Going to law school is a vocational education, as is getting an education to become a mechanic. Vocational educations take years (sometimes almost a decade) to complete. From the time you start your vocational education to the time you finish it, the market can drastically change (see Law and nursing). That lucrative job that you thought was waiting for you...isn't. What then?

What happens to mechanics if cars become fully automated? Will we need that many mechanics?

Yes, mechanics to build the machines to repair them in a fully automatic fashion.

For a thought experiment on this, check out http://thelightsinthetunnel.com/ which explores the idea that eventually humans will stop inventing because we'll have everything we need

But we wont need that many mechanics, probably just the really good ones (because there is now less demand))

Interesting premise, if not exactly novel, but some could argue that, excepting some needed advances in medicine, we do have everything we need and we're still not satisfied. It comes down to this, will humanity ever design/invent something universally recognized as being perfect? I don't think so, I will still try to check out the book though.

The assembly process is becoming more and more automated. Some newer cars need to be taken to licensed mechanics, essentially squeezing independent mechanics out of the market.

I don't think fully automated cars will have as drastic an impact on mechanics as 3D printed cars. A better question to ask is this:

What happens to all the mechanics when getting an entirely new vehicle is cheaper than paying to have it fixed?

The maintenance required of a 3D printed car will also probably be automated. There's no reason why we can't have robots replace tires, brake pads, and align wheels. Heck, they could even replace the parts that break or wear down by printing new ones on-demand.

The only parts that will still need to be stocked after 3D printed auto parts take hold is glass windows, tires, and similar components that require special manufacturing.

We already know how that is going to play out. Go ask your local radio and TV repairman.

(Although they weren't helped by the fact that transistorized designs simply didn't have parts that were expected to burn out on a regular basis.)

oh, they do. Capacitors in modern switching circuits should be treated as perishable.

And paying someone who knows how to fix them their rate to replace a $.10 part can cost more than getting a new thing. I dug a 19" UltraSharp display out of the trash, tested it, and found the problem to be some bulging caps in the power supply for the backlight. The parts cost less than a dollar, and it took about 4-6 hours of my time total. I was billing $90/hr 10 years ago to do PC repair, and we didn't touch electronics, so given the value of my time, it was definitely not worth it for me to repair this monitor, which is maybe worth $100 now ($60 if you can find a good deal).

Since a car is so large and complex, I highly doubt that repair costs will exceed replacement costs in the foreseeable future. Disc brake pads are under $100 for a set of 4 for most vehicles. It's hard to find a car for $100 in any sort of road-going condition to make it more cost-effective to swap cars instead of doing the repair.

A head gasket is different. On many older cars, the cost to replace it exceeds the value of the vehicle. Related: http://jalopnik.com/the-time-smoke-came-pouring-out-of-my-br...

This is of course aside from things like insurance, registration, bills of sale, etc which make swapping vehicles a big hassle right now.

I honestly don't see this situation changing in the next 20 years, and the future I see is more in shared vehicle ownership, where instead of owning a car directly, one might join an organization for a few hundred dollars a month which provides access to a network of vehicles, possibly self-driving ones. Uber is, as far as I can tell, trying to be the first to do this, and they might even charge for actual usage instead of some flat monthly fee. BMW is also looking into this, but given they're a car company and not a tech company, I expect them to be badly beaten to market: http://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/access-over-... (I'm sure there are other companies working on similar ideas as we speak).

Right, so my hypothetical was more to show the lack of ability for the average person to predict the future...not actually predicting it.

And that's the biggest flaw I see with a vocational education. It's preparing yourself tomorrow for the workforce of today. It can work, but be ready to be out of a job in an instant.

So you shouldn't pursue a computer science education?

Not what I'm saying at all. Although...maybe at some point in the future, a CS degree will be useless. It's certainly not now, nor will it be in the near future. But it certainly could happen.

Regardless, I'm pointing out the problems with the push for wide spread vocational education. My worry is the usefulness of such an education will have diminishing returns over the life of the recipient of the education, and that decay will be wide spread among many industries.

Look how fast industries and markets change now. Compare that to how long any given vocational education takes to accomplish plus the working lifespan of its recipient. The math doesn't add up to me.

Maybe this is my "old man" moment, but the magical world of 3D printed self driving cars that cost nothing really sounds like the flying car articles that you find in a circa 1960 Popular Mechanics.

I think this is a good perspective to have, but it might dissolve when you look at the technicalities of either problem. Airspace navigation vs, say, 3D-printing the electronics and parts necessary to make what I assume are electric cars are quite different challenges.

Actually, saying that out loud makes me think that you're right.

I would have agreed with the flying around problem being super hard.

But now, we have guys in trailers on Nevada controlling swarms of drones all over the world. Amazon wants to deliver stuff with them.

Perhaps the airspace thing is an easier problem than the magic car! :)

I think long before 3D-printed cars, the shift to all-electric drivetrains will put most mechanics out of business.

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