There's sort of no winning here!
AI unemploys middle-class workers: AI is stealing jobs from the middle class!
AI employs unionized middle-class workers: AI is stealing cheap labor from the rest of us!
There's sort of no winning here!
AI unemploys middle-class workers: AI is stealing jobs from the middle class!
AI employs unionized middle-class workers: AI is stealing cheap labor from the rest of us!
The employment is temporary, what follows a net negative, is the idea.
And "AI" as a concept has has no agency. This is all about humans who seek to further concentrate wealth.
That's pretty disingenuous.
The people losing jobs to AI can't just pivot into the trades. When you think about it, companies announcing they're pivoting into some other area where they have no prior background is usually a bit of a desperation move, aided by the fact that companies don't need to be licensed in any way to offer particular services, other than maybe in the military/national security sector.
As for the second point, it's true that this is just old-fashioned supply and demand. I predict the outcome is that there's a rush into the construction/contracting sector followed by a bust due to either the tech bubble popping and construction slowing way down, or the replacement of construction workers by humanoid robots, or perhaps some better form factor like robot spiders that can squeeze into small places - all the benefits of child labor but with double the appendages and double the productivity!
However, I'm not worried about the possibility of a robot takeover. The American people's final safeguard against a robot uprising is the irrationality of imperial weights and measures. Robots are digitals and can't do fractions like us higher beings. That's why I'm building my data centers measuring everything in cubits.
As an engineer in the US - we already do all the math in metric units. There are conversion functions in the UI layer to transform our units to whatever you want to see. (they also convert metric units if you don't like the units were are using internally)
> AI employs unionized middle-class workers: AI is stealing cheap labor from the rest of us!
What cheap labour? Tradespeople are not cheap (especially if you factor in the quality of the work). This just makes them even more expensive. Meaning a big impact on homes – you know, the things people and families live in, in order to survive. Pretty important
>Meaning a big impact on homes – you know, the things people and families live in, in order to survive.
Maybe those people should pay their tradespeople better then. Everybody's all "workers should be paid more" until they're the one paying the worker.
"Those people" who? Homebuilders? You're saying you think the cost of homebuilding should be much higher? When I listen to some of you guys it's not hard for me to see why these DCs are so unpopular
Everyone should just compete with the trillions of dollars of capital floating around for AI? And it's their fault for suddenly being 'poor'?
Sounds like you're assuming people are paying pennies for labour. I don't think that's true at all
While we're at it, how much should small bathroom, 2 week renovation cost? $100,000 in labour?
> While we're at it, how much should small bathroom, 2 week renovation cost? $100,000 in labour?
Obviously much more than 2 weeks worth of work at a commercial job, since that's the worst possible kind of work you could ever offer any tradesman. Maybe 8x the hourly rate would be fair since it's intermittent work with generally horrible customers?
It's been interesting to watch the IT/engineering classes all of a sudden pretend to care about labor costs and outsourcing/job loss. As an industry they have been by far the most impactful in reducing wages, enabling outsourcing, and "gaining efficiency" via automation while as a class being paid top-tier wages for doing so. There is not another industry more directly culpable for blue collar job loss except perhaps finance and banking.
Only now when the shoe is on the other foot do such folks seem to care at all.
Learn to code indeed.
For any electricians/plumbers/etc. out there? Go get yours. When the shoe was on the other foot you were mocked and told to switch careers, lowballed on horrible residential projects, told to skill up and get better if you wanted to get paid more, there was no future in the trades, etc. Make hay while the sun shines and ignore the bleating. At least this time around the bubble is sharing a bit of that tech wealth.
> For any electricians/plumbers/etc. out there? Go get yours. When the shoe was on the other foot you were mocked and told to switch careers, lowballed on horrible residential projects, told to skill up and get better if you wanted to get paid more, there was no future in the trades, etc. Make hay while the sun shines and ignore the bleating.
yeah instead they did the smart thing and they got together and passed protectionist policy to artificially inflate the value of their labor. Let's see how union tough you are when the administration changes and you have to compete with a global labor pool again.
That small bathroom job is literally the worst case scenario for a tradesman. They have to work nearly as hard to line that up as better paying longer term commercial work.
The residential buyer is the source of much less repeat work, is harder to deal with, more price conscious and harder to collect from than the commercial buyer they could be working for.
Anyone that can competently market, manage, and execute that small job can do the same for better customers.
The residential buyer has one advantage though: they do not demand as much from those working. You can start this business today, and likely find enough friends and family willing to take a chance on you that you can get started and from there you have references. Commercial projects tend to be big enough that you cannot get into them without experience (which in turn you cannot get).
The crew that can build a driveway cannot build a parking lot, and they will never be able to break into that market because it requires experience that a driveway cannot give. From a parking lot there is then road building - the previous companies cannot break into them. Again there are just not enough projects of the size that sits in between to build experience.
And even in residential, building million-dollar houses is easier (or at least not harder) and more profitable than building "affordable" starter homes.
And in time AI robots will reduce the need for these blue collar workers who are presently helping replace the white collar workers.
Just learned of a new acronym today "NILF," not in the labor force with over one million supposed NILFs out there -- dropped out and gave up.
Good luck with robots traing to lay up bricks, or doing plumbing in a home.
Making a brick laying robot is easy. I'm happy to do that if you want to fund my mid-life crisis... Note that I did not promise my brick laying robot can effectively compete with human break layers on cost. I fully expect my robot to be at least double the cost of humans doing the same work, and it will be less flexible than humans as well (meaning you need a different robot for different buildings)
Ummmm in time it's inevitable as in 2026 you do not need any skill to be a computer programmer. AI has replaced that once valuable skill and will continue it's way through ever white collar job til the robots (5 to 10 years) start taking the blue collar jobs away.
The blue collar job boom is great present day, but what they are helping build is their machine driven replacement.
Maybe this all sounds hyperbolic, but it's what Musk and all the AI overlords have said as far back as a 2013 or prior. Musk and Altman have noted the need for everyone to be on welfare (Universal Basic Income) since then. And no doubt we see this taking shape now within white collar jobs that once we held in high regard like programming being replaced by AI. I just created a whole startup web design, front-end, back-end development, native iPhone app, Android app and more using Codex (previously i hired others to help me a UI Design Front End guy).
Vibe coding by people with no programming skills is not going to happen. What will happen is moving to higher and higher code representations. A compiler is already doing 99% of the actual coding when you realize that the only language computers understand is assembly.
I am a UX Researcher, UX Design and Developer by trade since 2009. I don't know iphone development, python, any back end stuff and or in depth JS stuff.
But, Codex does and just by typing I just published a startup in python in two weeks using Codex and it's iPhone app will be available soon.
How do you not think AI will not destroy programming jobs if anyone can type to create anything they want or share your screen with Codex and have it guide you via voice? I just feed screenshot after screenshot to Codex to understand what I need to do next. Look forward to being able to share my screen and have it guide me via a voice conversation.
That's correct! AI is a negative for society no matter how you look at it. That's the entire idea!
> There's sort of no winning here!
> AI unemploys middle-class workers: AI is stealing jobs from the middle class!
> AI employs unionized middle-class workers: AI is stealing cheap labor from the rest of us!
Come on, you've got to know it's not going to employ those "unionized middle-class workers" for long. Their jobs are sort of like these jobs: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/10/business/ai-white-collar-... ("people participat[ing] in feeding their own careers into the A.I. wood chipper...Many people who contract for these companies understand that this is a short-term opportunity...before they themselves are automated out of the job").
And yeah, there's "sort of no winning" when you're gobbling up resources to build stuff people don't like.
I don't think that ANY project employs electricians and carpenters for long, because they are there to build something that will ideally last decades or more...
I'm not even sure it's as simple as "stuff people don't like." Many of the anti-AI crowd use ChatGPT which kind of complicates the question of "do they REALLY dislike it?"
I guess you could complain that robots will replace electricians and carpenters, but it's still going to be a decade before anyone trusts an LLM to wire a house.
> Many of the anti-AI crowd use ChatGPT which kind of complicates the question of "do they REALLY dislike it?"
Not more "revealed choice" BS. There's no free choice: even if someone doesn't want to use ChatGPT, they may not be allowed to avoid it. I'm literally forced to use it at work, for instance. Others may be forced to use it due to market or other pressures.
Personally, I wouldn't mind of someone dropped a couple cluster bombs on each of these AI data centers, after construction is complete, and LLMs just disappeared as a practical technology.
> I don't think that ANY project employs electricians and carpenters for long, because they are there to build something that will ideally last decades or more...
See my reply to the other guy who made the same point before you did.
> Not more "revealed choice" BS. There's no free choice
I'm not even talking about at work, I'm saying that a large majority of Americans are using AI of their own free will in situations where it's not required but is genuinely useful. The sheer number of people means that a lot of them must also say they're anti-AI, and my point is that whether or not they say they like it they're undeniably choosing to use it.
> Personally, I wouldn't mind of someone dropped a couple cluster bombs on each of these AI data centers, after construction is complete, and LLMs just disappeared as a practical technology.
This would be great if your goal was limiting AI access to the rich, but I'm pretty sure that would be much worse than democratizing access.
> See my reply to the other guy who made the same point before you did.
Yeah, and I still don't get it. Do you think that qualified electricians struggle to find work? They generally don't, these skills are in high demand and have been for decades. You really haven't made the case for "after they gain more experience on a difficult and high-paying job, they're gonna be unemployed." Everyone in these comments is complaining about waiting lists and backlogs and you're acting like the opposite is true.
>I'm not even talking about at work, I'm saying that a large majority of Americans are using AI of their own free will in situations where it's not required but is genuinely useful. The sheer number of people means that a lot of them must also say they're anti-AI, and my point is that whether or not they say they like it they're undeniably choosing to use it.
I don't think there's really a contradiction there. You can recognize the utility of something while acknowledging that, on the whole, it'd be better if it didn't exist.
If people are using it presumably they're getting some value out of it which means that most objections to datacenters are NIMBYism and not some kind of principled stance.
Datacenters are fine. They're better than most kinds of industrial buildings, by and large they don't illegally set up fields of gas turbines, and their water usage is really not that bad compared to other large users. They make for a few nice, high-paying jobs. Sure, they're ugly and large, but this is America and we have no shortage of ugly, large buildings.
>If people are using it presumably they're getting some value out of it which means that most objections to datacenters are NIMBYism and not some kind of principled stance.
No, one does not follow from the other. I might campaign against the building of a road because I believe the funds could be better spent on something else. If the road is built, am I a hypocrite for using it? No. The road is already there. Whether I use it or not, the funds are already spent. I may as well use it.
Something can be positive under a narrow lens, and a negative under a broader one. There's no hypocrisy in acknowledging both realities.
>Datacenters are fine.
Datacenters and AI are distinct things. Someone can be in favor of one and not the other, with no contradiction.
>You can recognize the utility of something while acknowledging that, on the whole, it'd be better if it didn't exist.
There's a word for that: hypocrisy.
That's when you say others shouldn't use it while you use it.
I don't like the parts of the city that are full of concrete and (edit: lacking) trees. I still walk or drive through there instead of making a huge detour, I still use them because that's what's there, currently. I know processed food sucks, sometimes it's easiest to grab something that's quick to make or can be eaten instantly because the supermarket is full of them.
And even assuming it means hypocrisy, so? You think you'd withstand examination? Face the arguments, instead of using some abstract fantasies about some average AI critic that doesn't exist as an excuse. At least they're only hypocritical like everyone else including you, instead of acting like a 3 yo, "yeah but you're stupid, so".
No. That's not what the word means.
> I'm not even talking about at work, I'm saying that a large majority of Americans are using AI of their own free will in situations where it's not required but is genuinely useful.
Where is your data to back up such an assertion? I'm not even sure how you could determine "of their own free will in situations where it's not required but is genuinely useful," except maybe in a yes/no survey question, which is suspect.
It's also worth noting that AI is getting shoved down peoples throats. Want to do a Google Search? Congratulations, you're now using AI of your own "free will"!
> The sheer number of people means that a lot of them must also say they're anti-AI, and my point is that whether or not they say they like it they're undeniably choosing to use it.
Usually when people like you make points like that, they're trying to undermine the "anti" argument by implying hypocrisy. My point is "choice" can't actually reveal that, because the environment of that choice is too complex. The observation is a meaningless factoid.
But that's true of most carpentry and electrical jobs. In-house carpenters and electricians are a minority.
I was responding to the implied symmetry in the GP: the "employs" does not balance out the "unemploys", because the unemployment is likely permanent and the employment temporary.
And then there's the fucked up resource allocation: throwing around insane amounts of money, driving up the prices of things the people actually want, to build hated things for investors and billionaires, which is a separate issue.
The unemployment of electricians and carpenters is permanent? On a long-enough timescale, where we have much more advanced robotics, probably. Not in the near or medium-term.
The fucked up resource allocation is itself an indicator of wealth inequality. A generation ago growing companies had to go public to access funding. Now they can find all the capital they need in private markets.