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Comment by yojo | Hacker News Reader

Having spent a couple years rehabbing a 100 year old house, I’m convinced the trades will be the last thing to go. When the building you’re working on has been ship-of-Theseus’d by 3 generations of home owners, everything is out of distribution.

When a robot can reliably do this work, I think it can reliably do any human job that requires physical ability and judgement.

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But the problem wont be the robots. Itll be the flood of new workers who will offer to rehab the place cheaper than you. And itll be that the white collar owners of the house wont have enough money to blow on a rehab bwcause their desk jobs are getting replaced by AI

It's not the robots that are going to blow the floor out of the trades; it's the legions of people joining the trades that will do it.

Especially if you get into a specialized trade for people with money.

I’ve repaired a lot of my historic windows myself because of how expensive it is to get someone else to do it. (Quoted 8k for one leaded glass window) I think it’s become my new backup job if I really am replaced by a computer.

We really need automated roofing. Installing shingles is easy, except that it has to be done on top of buildings. There's an experimental roofing robot, but it's not good enough for production yet.[1]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=60DqYMO_nRE

Metal roofs seem nice and easier to install too, but at least where I had a house built (Ireland) the local planners (aka meddling old people with too much time) thought it wasn’t suitable for a “home” so you had to spend four times as much on a slate roof.

If the other 2 comments still make it hard to understand, South Park had a great episode explaining this.

we wont be living in these houses because cost of mainintence will be unaffordable.

we will be living in houses that can be reparied by robots.

Eh, it's been cheaper and better for a long time to just demolish and rebuild rather than deal with neverending issues at major fixer uppers. Robots probably would be able to do uncomplicated cookie-cutter builds in a decade or two, there's just too much money in the construction sector that AI companies looking for the next big thing to disrupt can't ignore.

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