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Comment by megamix | Hacker News Reader

Oh my bad! You can either categorize them as 'artisans' and 'blue collar'.

E.g. in no particular order: metal smith (silver gold etc), welder, carpentry, plumber, mechanic, fine artist, sculptor, textile. Basically the 'real trades' that have been around and should be around for many years.

The type of jobs that the white collars can't do without.

Either you outperform other CEOs and get rich on your own business, or you go this other path as I exemplified :D.

Now the gray zone is your regular 9-5, probably good co-workers, you make good living and work to live. The downside is that flexibility. So you need to think about what trades are you willing to make. I didn't mean to sound so 'dramatic' and pretend it's all black and white.

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> metal smith (silver gold etc), welder, carpentry, plumber, mechanic, fine artist, sculptor, textile

Industrial production has had a huge impact on many of those and will continue doing so. It‘s wrong to romanticize these jobs, they are just a likely to be automated.

Anything that can be mass produced, yes. Anything that requires bespoke work with dexterity, unlikely.

I think it's much more likely LLMs become good enough to replace programmers before we have robots replacing plumbers.

>robots replacing plumbers

That would be utopia.

Exactly!

Subject to automation as any other human endeavour.

Might as well say to get a real job like hunting, foraging for berries or animal herding.

Yeah I'd like to see someone automating carpentry :)

Not a carpenter, but what would be the problem?

Granted it might be still cheaper for humans to do the labor for some time, but eventually we will have most houses manufactured (home printing) or done as a prefab and assembled. For luxury some could be custom made by AI powered robots, based on user prompt.

Speculations of course.

I don't think that AI can reach such a level to install and measure everything without a carpenter. The gap is quite big and requires data which doesn't exist in the real world to feed into a model that can power AI to such an exact degree.

Look at how far we've come with LLM, that's only because we have so much texts readily available to train those models. In real life you'd have to manage a dataset combining different configurations of installations, even within prefab and assemblies you cannot reach the accuracy in my opinion without carrying a huge risk.

I don't really see how any of those examples are intrinsically different than being an independent contractor of any kind, with the exception of them being physical or purely artistic endeavors.

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