david123•1mo agoProlific Poster

A client in Phoenix asked me something about AI that made me think

I was giving a quote for a kitchen remodel last month, and the homeowner, an older guy named Frank, was watching a news segment about self-driving cars. He turned to me and said, 'You work with your hands. Do you think these smart machines will ever be able to do what you do, to see a problem and fix it on the spot?' It wasn't a tech question, it was a real worry about his own job and mine. I told him that right now, an AI can't look at a warped floor joist and figure out the three different ways to sister it in. But his question stuck with me because it's not about if the tech is smart, but if it can handle the messy, unexpected stuff. It made me look into construction robotics more, and they're good for repetitive tasks, but not for Frank's crooked 1950s house. Has anyone else had a conversation that shifted how you see AI moving into physical jobs?

2 comments

2 Comments

xena_murphy1mo ago

Ever get that feeling tech is solving for a perfect world that doesn't exist? I had a plumber ask me the same kind of thing while he was elbow-deep fixing a botched DIY job. The real gap isn't smarts, it's about dealing with the weird surprises that come with old buildings and human mistakes. My take is the jobs that stay safe longest are the ones where every day throws a new, ugly problem at you that a machine has never seen before.

emma_smith1mo ago

But what happens when machines start learning from those ugly surprises? They could get trained on endless repair logs and weird cases, turning new problems into old data. The real safety might be in jobs where the problem itself changes faster than any database can update.