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- Hacker News
- So - when the slump comes it will be possible to get an electrician for your house or to fit solar panes, but the chance of having money to pay for it is another thing.by stuaxo
- I think that by the time AI can fully automate software engineering, it will be able to fully automate physical electrical work.
The challenge in both cases is all the invisible, hard-to-describe stuff that people are doing which business people take for granted.
Business people don't consider "minimizing complexity" to be something software engineers do, but it's literally the most important part of the job for any large complex project and it's almost impossible to measure. Even humans are pretty bad at it but at least there is a limit. With AI, there is no awareness of this and more complexity means more tokens to sell today and in the future to maintain so there is a perverse incentive and no guardrails.
Also, software engineers make a lot of decisions based on human factors and factors that are unique to the company/project.
For electricians, the part which AI struggles to automate is robotics and stuff like travelling to the job location, ensuring the right cables are available, identifying the right port to plug the cables into, drilling holes if necessary, climbing into the ceiling, pulling rolls of cables along the ceiling or wall with appropriate attachments, setting up the electrical boxes.
I think in the near future, all manual jobs will be replaced by a combination of specialist robots and generalist "human minders"; a minder will be transferrable across any industry and the entire job will be exception handling any unexpected issues which the engineers didn't yet train or program into the specialist robots.
by jongjong - Yeh i see you never went to a location to be surprised by reality.
Dream on.
by lstodd - AI won’t be replacing first year apprentices crawling through ceilings for $11 an hour while either you or I are still alive.
It’s not that we can’t do it today, it’s because like orbital data centres, it is nowhere close to being economically sensible.
Electrical and other safety-critical work very sensibly requires a skilled human to sign off on the results. This important safety requirement seems incompatible with your vision.
by bigfatkitten - My next door neighbors’ tiny (>50 people) electrical company has been booking millions in lighting protection installation work across the east coast. Theyve made more from dc work in the last three years than the previous 20.
- Get it now, while the getting is good. Chip maker valuation in Korea is going down[1]. The bubble may be coming to an end sooner than we would like.
1. https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/south-koreas-kosp...
- Thanks to the South Korean President pumping the KOSPI with leverage and then shortly tightening the rules once things looked unsustainable.by 1-6
- “The bubble ending” is possible the biggest meme of 2026 (and onwards).by fbrncci
- As long as Nvidia pays you to buy Nvidia, which the stock market increasingly does not like.
RAM manufacturers are falling, and today after the MSFT numbers are out we'll see additional CapEx worries.
by Zsfe510asG - Why should software companies hire electricians and carpenters by the thousands?
Because these are not AI companies, these are infrastructure companies as their main source of revenue and cost is renting and building infrastructure.
by Frieren - Which has been a general point about AI - it's expensive to build and expensive to run, and requires a lot of infrastructure. Which is increasingly making it look like software might turn into a limited margin business, like making cars.by torginus
- Next, plumbers. The future of data centers seems to be more liquid cooling and less ductwork. Take a look at this new 1 megawatt server rack.[1] It has more pipes than cables. All that coolant flow and all that electrical power in a crowded space is scary.by Animats
- I wouldn't bet on it. Process plumbing is substantially more exempt (varies by state and situation, obviously) from the various licensing cartels and rackets that make supply inelastic and drive up labor costs. So they probably won't be paying out the nose for licensed trades on that stuff.
- Listen to the video again, he clarifies early on that this is supporting multiple racks. A megawatt is 1000kW. If you took 5 B300 systems (10 rack units each), you'd still only be at 75kW, which if you're doing redundancy properly, means you have wired 150kW to the rack, but you're not generating a megawatt of heat.by Esras
- > All that coolant flow and all that electrical power in a crowded space is scary.
Maybe it's a non-conductive oil? I recall seeing someone who overclocked their PC (circa 2005) to 5GHz, and ran the motherboard completely submerged in an oil bath.
by lelanthran - The next demand for those trades will be for war plants.
For those who haven't noticed, the US/Israel/Iran war and the Ukraine/Russia war just merged. Countries currently shooting at each other: Ukraine, Russia, Iran, Israel, US, UAE, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, Iraq, Yemen, Jordan, Egypt, Bahrain, Kuwait... See the lead story in the New York Times for the past two days.
This war has crossed an important threshold. No pair of countries, one on each side, can stop the war now. The US and Iran can no longer stop it alone. Ukraine and Russia can no longer stop it alone. This is very like WWI - too many combatants with differing motivations. This much isn't a projection. This is the current reality.
It looks like a long war. Expect a very large, expensive military buildup. That's going to need war plants, built in a hurry. Ammunition. Weapons. Drones by the millions.
by Animats - Wait who is Egpyt, Bahrain and Kuwait shooting at?
Also why would you not include Afghanistan and its war with Pakistan or China's various diplomatic issues with its neighbors?
Why would you ignore all the wars and conflict going on in rest of the African continent?
Your comment come across trying to piece together a particular vision of world conflicts that maps neatly into suiting a narrative. You say its the current reality but its only a slice of the current reality and a lot of it is factually wrong.
by altmanaltman - > For those who haven't noticed, the US/Israel/Iran war and the Ukraine/Russia war just merged.
In what way?
> No pair of countries, one on each side, can stop the war now. The US and Iran can no longer stop it alone. Ukraine and Russia can no longer stop it alone.
It seems to me like you’re undermining your point here. No two sides can stop it alone because they are separate conflicts. The US and Iran can agree to stop fighting. Ukraine and Russia can do the same. The reason they don’t affect each other is because they’re separate conflicts.
by afavour - Most of these countries have been participating in bombing or getting bombed on and off for the last decade (and longer).
You are reading too much into the current media hype cycle, and not really reading the geopolitics in place, which puts a lot of pressure internally on these countries to not escalate further. This includes both Ukraine / Russia and the middle east which you are so eager to tie together on the slightest connection.
by gpt5 - It's nice to hear tradespeople getting paid well with lots of work. I'm happy for them :-)by kristov
- For the next 6 months until they get all replaced by robotsby goodpoint
- Allegedly many an American 'believes' that Jesus will be back some time right about now. They are serious about this belief, however, it is never explained as to how he waves a magic wand and fixes the many, many entirely man-made problems we have.
But now I see the light. Jesus was a carpenter, right?
I am imagining that Jesus, with his carpentry skills, is driving right now in his Chevy truck to the job site, to help erect that data centre for one of our billionaire overlords.
Just saying, it could happen, and is probably needed to happen, if this data centre build out is to get anywhere near completion.
by Theodores - Tradespeople have always been getting paid well with lots of work.
Most electricians will make more than the average sysadmin, senior developer or network engineer here.
The amount of people getting into trades over the past decade has dropped drastically. There is no reason a fully qualified, even residential electrician cannot make 200k a year. Electricians aren't even the highest paid trade, plumbers are.
by HDBaseT - just don't forget these are temporary, eventually there will be "enough" data centers, and none of these jobs will exist, so if you are planning a 20 year + career, don't count on this being the norm.by fl4regun
- Yes, that's good. It also prices out a lot of other better uses for their labor. Projects I work on have seen prices soar. I don't consider building the things everyone hates because they promise concentration of wealth and an attack on labor at the expense of building literally anything else to be somehow a big W for labor because a few people get a slightly higher temporary paycheck. Ask the Wagyu cows how they feel about the hand they are dealt.by willis936
- I would be very careful about basing your career decsions based on this trend. The data center build out will always be very boom and bust, which would really suck to work in. One year you would be making 300k working on dataceters and the next you would make 30k because thousands of electricians are now competing to build a few single family homes.by kvisner
- > The data center build out will always be very boom and bust, which would really suck to work in.
HVAC and electrical (e.g. UPSes) need somewhat regular maintenance, so once build-out is done, if you're with one of the OEMs, you'll probably have regular work babysitting the gear.
by throw0101d - Being over reactive to anything you hear in the news is generally a bad idea. It’s always a view so zoomed in to a single blip on the chart that ignores the wider landscape.by Gigachad
- I feel like we're entering an age of electrification so having training/education in a field related to electrics/electronics seems like a reasonable path for someone to take.by barbazoo
- Yeah, but you might still want to enter the field based on the aging of the current workforce. Seems likely to be a shortage of electricians over the next while.by pianopatrick