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Fear not, dreary laborer. There will always be back-breaking jobs you can do when your office ones get taken over by obsequious AI models<\/a>.<\/p>\n For one reason or another, plumbing is the profession that AI figures keep coming back to when they assure us that there\u2019ll still be leftovers after a AI jobs apocalypse<\/a>. A new piece<\/a> in the Financial Times explores how plumbing has become the \u201ccareer talisman\u201d in an age of automation, and how this grates with traditional social perceptions of these professions.<\/p>\n Take one doctor\u2019s reaction to her son\u2019s decision to become a plumber. The first in her family to go to university, she told the FT she felt \u201coddly guilty\u201d about his career choice, as if she was letting down her parents who worked hard to elevate her social and academic position.<\/p>\n It felt like \u201cI was somehow not paying forward,\u201d she told the FT. \u201cAm I the blip in my family\u2019s more traditional working-class journey?\u201d<\/p>\n It points to an interesting cultural moment. A recent Wired piece<\/a> cited Anirban Basu, chief economist of construction industry trade group Associated Builders and Contractors, who described how in earlier eras, tradespeople passed their skills down to their children, but eventually started encouraging them to pursue higher education instead. Basu claimed that, as a result, construction workers with the most advanced skills are now entering retirement age. Meanwhile, a Jobber survey cited by the FT found that only seven percent of parents would prefer their kids to pursue a trade or vocation.\u00a0<\/p>\n On the one hand, skilled trades like plumbers and electricians seem like safe bets amid uncertainty over how AI will automate white collar jobs ranging from writers, secretaries, doctors<\/a>, to even the programmers<\/a> building the AI systems themselves<\/a>. And why shouldn\u2019t skilled vocations be seen with the same prestige and appreciation as white collar callings?<\/p>\n In fact, the Wired piece reported on how demand for construction workers was being driven by the AI boom. With the rapid build out of AI data centers, there\u2019s an increased shortage of these skilled tradespeople that can help build these advanced facilities. A McKinsey study estimated that an additional 130,000 trained electricians would be needed in the US between 2023 and 2030. Tech companies themselves are sounding the alarm, with Google last year donating an undisclosed amount to the Electrical Training Alliance. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, proclaimed<\/a> that \u201cif you\u2019re an electrician, you\u2019re a plumber, a carpenter \u2014 we\u2019re going to need hundreds of thousands of them to build all of these factories.\u201d<\/p>\n But on the other hand, there\u2019s a certain nefarious element to powerful figures glorifying physically grueling professions that aren\u2019t easy to get into. Kepler Ridge told the FT that he credited the money he made through plumbing for being able to buy a home. But after six years in the trade, he left to go to grad school for biology, and provided words of caution to other people who wanted to take up plumbing themselves.<\/p>\n \u201cIt was extremely physical,\u201d he told the FT. I was exhausted at the end of every single day. I found myself wanting to come home and go to bed.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n What\u2019s more, while there\u2019s demand for these jobs, there\u2019s no guarantee you\u2019ll even be able to nab an apprenticeship. And you\u2019ll be competing against everyone else trying to get in while the going\u2019s supposed to be good, too. In northern Virginia, home to the country\u2019s \u201cdata center alley\u201d where construction of these facilities continues to surge, there\u2019s no shortage of people applying to become plumbers, Chris Madello, an international representative with the United Association, told Wired.<\/p>\n \u201cWe always have far more people applying than we actually accept into our apprenticeship programs,\u201d Madello added.<\/p>\n