White collar can always move up the value chain. White collar work didn’t go away when spreadsheets went from paper to digital or when spreadsheets turned into SaaS applications. Software getting cheap expands the market for software and always has.
AI makes higher education even more valuable as it becomes even more important to have better logic, reasoning, and creative skills than a computer or robot. In the trades you’ve got no recourse if an automatic bricklaying machine comes out.
Trades end up running into the problem where you can only do so much work in an hour. Your customers will only pay $XXX to get a new toilet installed and you can’t install 10 toilets at the same time time.
Plus, the trades wreck your body. I recently served on jury duty and the lead lawyer for the plaintiff told the court she was over 70 years old. I don’t know any 75 year old plumbers.
> White collar can always move up the value chain.
Only if you can. People in trades move up into the white collar aspect of the work all the time. It's much harder to do the reverse when you're in your late thirties and your career goes away.
I’ll take a free furnace please
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Trades are doomed
Trades are safe. White collar is what's doomed.
White collar can always move up the value chain. White collar work didn’t go away when spreadsheets went from paper to digital or when spreadsheets turned into SaaS applications. Software getting cheap expands the market for software and always has.
AI makes higher education even more valuable as it becomes even more important to have better logic, reasoning, and creative skills than a computer or robot. In the trades you’ve got no recourse if an automatic bricklaying machine comes out.
Trades end up running into the problem where you can only do so much work in an hour. Your customers will only pay $XXX to get a new toilet installed and you can’t install 10 toilets at the same time time.
Plus, the trades wreck your body. I recently served on jury duty and the lead lawyer for the plaintiff told the court she was over 70 years old. I don’t know any 75 year old plumbers.
In ecosystems, progressively fewer individuals are supported at each higher trophic level.
> White collar can always move up the value chain.
Only if you can. People in trades move up into the white collar aspect of the work all the time. It's much harder to do the reverse when you're in your late thirties and your career goes away.
The most boring reality is the most probable. No one is doomed.
On what basis is that the most probable?
Many job categories have been completely wiped out in the past, so why do you believe it’s improbable more jobs cannot be wiped out now.
The most boring reality is lifeless. Are we all doomed by this reasoning?
The most common outcome on Polymarket is "no", meaning most things don't end up happening and things continue on as is. That's what "boring" implies.
Someone even made a "nothing ever happens" trade bot that was shared on here as a meme/experiment that always bets on nothing happening.
> The most common outcome on Polymarket is "no", meaning most things don't end up happening
HN is such a beautiful, diverse meeting of the minds. Comments like this put a big smile on my face.
Easy for "10xDev" to say.