Plumbing is the future. Or so Geoffrey Hinton, the “godfather of AI”, has said. “The jobs that are going to survive AI for a long time are jobs where you have to be very adaptable and physically skilled, and plumbing’s that kind of job.”
He is not the only one. Jensen Huang, chief executive of chipmaker Nvidia, told Channel Four News: “If you’re an electrician, you’re a plumber, a carpenter — we’re going to need hundreds of thousands of them to build all of these factories.” In the US, according to Jobber, which provides software to trades, when asked which careers feel safest from automation, more than half of parents cited plumbers, carpenters and electricians. Just 18 per cent saw software developers and 11 per cent accountants as resilient professions.
Plumbers have become the career talisman in the age of artificial intelligence, as many question the value of a degree, especially with the burden of student debt. One woman told me that, among middle-class parents in her neck of the woods, the topic has begun to replace the conversation about house prices as their kids approach university age and they weigh the value of higher education against working in a skilled trade. A neighbour’s plumber bragged that his brother was a doctor, yet only one of them had three Porsches.