Paywall, so replying based on the headline:

Blue collar jobs are not a holy grail of safety from ai or refuge for prior white collar workers who have been displaced.

1. You can’t just suddenly become an expert in a physical job, electricians require trade school and apprenticeship, heck even the easiest jobs in the construction world, painting or hanging drywall, require expertise and a random qa engineer will be genuinely terrible at the job.
2. The culture of blue collar work generally incredibly misogynistic and requires a very hardy insensitive personality for women especially. There’s this sort of cultural inertia that has seeped into many blue collar jobs that sees a lot of love for trump and hate for soft handed people (the irony is incredible)
3. Supply and demand are not just principles of product sales, a sudden massive influx of blue collar workers will push down wages for everyone, an economy requires balance and adaptation, there is never a single golden answer
4. some blue collar jobs are more likely to be replaced with ai than others, but pretending that all blue collar jobs are perfectly safe from the impending storm is an uninformed and irresponsible take. Are indoor painters of new builds safe for now? Yes. But you can feel quite comfortable assuming that if some company comes out with a bot you can rent that does a phenomenal job at painting and costs 1/5th of a human painter the owners or managers of the companies who were contracting out the humans will absolutely switch to bots. Money talks and maybe some will hold out for a while but eventually other companies will offer their services for cheaper because of the cheaper labor and the human workforces will be unable to compete.
5. blue collar jobs generally pay less and the future prospects compared to white collar jobs are significantly different. You don’t start out as a framer and end up as a partner, the attitudes of the managers of construction companies and similar often simply view the laborers as replaceable machines.
6. blue collar workers sucks, for many you work in crazy harsh weather conditions (outside in 100 degree f) the jobs often require heavy physical labor, your coworkers are often drugged up conspiracy theory nutjobs, there are no watercooler breaks at 10am, you work hard or you get yelled at or fired. Imagine being an hvac repair technician in the peak of summer. Where exactly do you think you’re going to be? In the hottest part of the house in stifling conditions with all the pink fiberglass insulation without any ppe, all goddamn day.

*Laughs in working for an AI company being a Mechanical Turk.

Seriously, we are all gonna just end up with jobs fixing AI mistakes as we burn down the planet with it. It’s so absurd. Accurate LLMs are literally a Mechanical Turk supported by large teams of humans fixing their work for them.

I am no longer afraid of being replaced by AI.