An open-ended question to HN: given the current rate of innovation in AI and the increase in popularity (hence more uni students studying CS), will learning a trade still be worth it 10 years down the line?
Trade jobs will be even better then! Because everybody will be busy fighting for the few well paid CS jobs. Why? OpenCV is 24 years old today and yet Amazon has an army of people who just pick things from the boxes. For last 10 years we have unlimited processing power and it’s not different today. Self driving cars are somehow progressed from Project Prometheus https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eureka_Prometheus_Project But still my model Y does once a while phantom braking while driving by itself. Do you see something huge coming in humanity’s tech development to change things radically?
Every well paid engineer or manager will pay somebody a lot of money to make water flow again or have lights and internet working asap. That’s obvious.
In a timeline where ai continues to advance at the current rate and ends up destroying a lot of office jobs I could see the trades becoming much more competitive since the potential labor pool would become much larger.
You’re not right on this. Office workers are not suitable for trade jobs. They have these chicken arms, overweight, spine problems and no endurance. Drilling or digging or crawling under pipes whole day requires good health. There are 4 guys from a team of 11 people I work with that look healthy and fit for such jobs. Others (heavily) obese or not fit after an accident. Or too old.
When I invite my ex colleagues and they offer to help in my under-construction-house it’s very sad to see a young guy lying flat after 60-90 minutes of hard work.
Yeah but that isn't exactly the question - AI will presumably push up the median living standard because a bunch of things get cheaper and nothing gets worse. There are just more options and everything is better organised. A bit like being a king in ancient India vs a barista today. The barista still gets better medical care than the king, even though it is a much lower status role and quite competitive compared to ruling a country.
The real question is "what roles are going to be in a good position to capture value from all the wealth generation?". As far as people selling labour are concerned it could be the trades.
Depends on what happens with robotics, but I don't think I can even imagine how to put myself in the shoes of a 17 year old in 10 years time thinking about the future, I'd guess the things they can dream to go and do will be vastly different than we did? The Anthropic AI report was very eye opening, and then this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tu7LSNYWDTs
For the conceivable future, people will still need their lights to work and their toilets to flush. I would hope it's worth it because it's a lot better than the alternative.
