Whenever the subject of AI and jobs comes up, somebody inevitably says something along the lines of:
“Well, at least plumbers are safe.”
And I understand the argument.
Chatbots can write code, produce marketing copy, analyse spreadsheets, draft legal documents and create images. But it can’t crawl underneath your kitchen sink with a spanner and, watching the Robot Olympics this year, it looks like it won’t be able to for some time to come!
Therefore, plumbers, electricians, carpenters and other tradespeople are supposedly sitting pretty while the rest of us knowledge workers nervously wonder what our jobs will look like in five years’ time.
I’m not convinced.
And, amusingly, it was a conversation with my brother-in-law — who is a plumber — that made me realise why.
My plumber no longer needs a web developer
My brother-in-law is a self-employed plumber in Epsom.
When I saw him last Christmas, he proudly informed me that he didn’t need me to help him with his website anymore.
He’d got ChatGPT to do it.
As somebody who builds websites for a living, I could perhaps have been offended. But this was my brother-in-law. I wasn’t exactly losing a lucrative contract.
If anything, I was impressed.
Something he would previously have needed my knowledge and experience to accomplish was now something he could have a reasonable crack at himself, with an AI guiding him through it.
Fair enough.
But I had a story for him too.
This web developer no longer needed a plumber
For ages, I’d had a problem with my central heating; one particular radiator simply wouldn’t get properly hot.
And it wasn’t for lack of professional advice. We’d had three local (supposedly expert) plumbers look at it. One from Bexhill-on-Sea, one from Hastings and one from Ore and the proposed solutions became increasingly expensive …
Two of them proposed a more powerful “industrial” pump. One suggested a power flush of the system would solve it. There was even a suggestion that the troublesome radiator needed moving onto its own flow and return circuit! Not one of them considered that the system needed balancing!!!
The suggested costs were all heading towards £1,000 or more.
Instead, I discussed the problem with ChatGPT.
I went through the symptoms. It considered how the heating system behaved. We experimented with the other radiators and gradually worked through balancing the system.
And it worked.
Not perfectly. There’s still room for improvement.
But that previously cold radiator now gets hot.
Cost: £0.
Unbelievably three separate local plumbers had been unable to see that three older radiators and a new towel rail were hogging all the pressure!
Suddenly my brother-in-law’s story about building his own static website had a rather nice counterpart.
The plumber had used AI to avoid needing a web designer.
The web developer had used AI to avoid paying a plumber.
But ChatGPT can’t fix a leaking pipe
No. It can’t.
And this is where I think the usual discussion about which jobs are “safe from AI” misses something important. We tend to imagine AI replacing entire jobs …
- Can AI replace a web developer?
- Can AI replace an accountant?
- Can AI replace a solicitor?
- Can AI replace a plumber?
But jobs aren’t indivisible things. They’re collections of tasks.
A plumber’s job isn’t simply “doing plumbing“. It includes diagnosing faults, deciding what needs replacing, suggesting solutions, explaining systems, identifying likely causes and determining whether something actually requires physical intervention at all.
AI doesn’t need to replace the plumber to affect the plumbing industry.
It only needs to enable customers to do some of those tasks themselves.
The first casualty could be the call-out
Imagine you’ve got a radiator that doesn’t heat properly.
Ten years ago, your options were fairly limited. You could search Google, wade through forum posts and YouTube videos, or call somebody who knew about central heating.
Today you can have an interactive conversation with an AI.
You can tell it what boiler you’ve got. Explain exactly what the system is doing. Show it photographs. Give it temperature readings. Tell it what you’ve already tried.
It can ask you questions.
- “Does the pipe on the inlet side get hot?”
- “What happens if you close the other radiators?”
- “Is the lockshield valve open?”
- “Have you bled the radiator?”
And crucially, it can adapt its next suggestion to your answer.
That’s fundamentally different from finding a webpage entitled 10 Reasons Your Radiator Isn’t Getting Hot.
It is much closer to having somebody knowledgeable standing beside you while you investigate the problem.
Sometimes the conclusion will still be:
You need a plumber.
But sometimes it won’t.
And every time it isn’t, that’s potentially one fewer paid job for a plumber.
AI doesn’t have to hold the spanner
This is the bit I think people underestimate. AI doesn’t need hands to disrupt a job involving hands. Suppose AI allows a homeowner to determine that their problem is a £12 valve rather than a £1,200 system flush.
They might still employ a plumber to replace that valve but instead of paying somebody to investigate the problem, diagnose it, try various solutions and carry out the repair, they’re employing somebody for a much narrower task:
“Please replace this valve.”
The plumber hasn’t disappeared.
But the amount of plumbing expertise the customer needs to purchase has shrunk.
And in plenty of cases, particularly for reasonably competent DIYers, AI may guide them through doing the simple jobs themselves.
That’s disruption.
This won’t just affect plumbers
The same principle applies to an enormous number of practical jobs supposedly protected from AI.
A carpenter may still need to cut and fit the timber, but AI can help the homeowner work out what timber they need, produce a cutting list and explain how to build something themselves.
A mechanic still has to replace a failed component, but AI can help an owner interpret symptoms, understand an error code and challenge an unnecessary repair.
An electrician may still be essential for work that is dangerous, regulated or requires professional competence, but AI can help a homeowner establish that the mysterious “electrical fault” is actually something far simpler before calling one.
There are obvious limits.
There are jobs where attempting DIY would be stupid or dangerous. There are regulations and certifications for good reasons. And AI can certainly be wrong — sometimes spectacularly so.
But none of that requires AI to eliminate tradespeople before it has an economic effect on them.
It merely has to reduce the number of occasions on which we need them.
The jobs that survive AI won’t necessarily remain unchanged
I think that’s the mistake we’re making when we divide occupations into two camps: “AI can replace this” and “AI can’t replace this.”
The future is probably much messier than that.
AI doesn’t have to replace 100% of a profession to transform its economics.
Perhaps it removes 10% of the work.
Perhaps 20%.
Perhaps customers increasingly arrive having already diagnosed the problem.
Perhaps straightforward call-outs decline while genuinely difficult jobs become a greater proportion of a tradesperson’s workload.
Perhaps the most valuable plumbers of the future aren’t simply the ones who know how to diagnose common problems, because every customer has an AI capable of helping with that. They’re the ones with the experience and physical skills to solve the difficult problems after the obvious possibilities have already been eliminated.
That’s still a valuable profession.
It just isn’t an untouched one.
Nobody gets to declare themselves safe yet
I’m a web developer. I’m under no illusion that AI won’t change what I do.
It already has.
And my plumber brother-in-law building his own static website with ChatGPT is a perfect little example of that.
But I think my radiator is an equally important example in the opposite direction.
AI couldn’t come into my house.
It couldn’t turn a valve.
It couldn’t feel which radiator was warming up.
It couldn’t rebalance the heating system itself.
I could.
What AI did was give me enough knowledge and guidance to do something that I would previously have paid an expert to figure out.
And that’s why I don’t buy the idea that plumbers are “safe from AI.”
The robot doesn’t necessarily need to come into your house and pick up the spanner.
Sometimes it just needs to tell you which spanner to pick up.
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