A blue-collar bloodbath is inevitable

The blowtorch brigade is having a moment, and what a moment it is. We’re watching the rivet gun get its revenge.

White-collar layoffs make headlines while tradesmen name their price. If your sink explodes at 3 a.m., ChatGPT can’t fix it. But that’s just the start. What comes next moves in slow, silent steps. It’s harder to notice, harder to fight. 

Even the skilled trades, once thought untouchable, won’t be immune for long. That’s because, in the age of AI, no collar is safe forever, no matter how dirty or clean. In other words, a blue-collar bloodbath is inevitable.

For now, trades thrive because machines still fumble with fine motor skills. Plumbers, welders, electricians — these are jobs that demand real dexterity. They require quick thinking and the kind of judgment you can’t automate. It’s one thing to answer questions in a chat window. It’s another to crawl under a leaking floorboard and rewire a breaker box while water drips on your neck. Even the flashiest robot arm isn’t replacing that anytime soon.

But the key phrase is “anytime soon,” not never. 

That’s what keeps getting lost in the blue-collar victory lap. Yes, carpenters and plasterers are in demand. Yes, robots still fumble with chaos and fine detail. But AI doesn’t sleep. It doesn’t stall. And most importantly, it doesn’t peak. It doesn’t just take jobs — it studies them, watches, learns, and improves — quietly, constantly.

We’re long past the clunky prototypes. Boston Dynamics’ robot dogs patrol warehouses and climb stairs with military grace. Machines are already pouring slabs, laying bricks, finishing drywall with machine-shop precision. Robotic arms thread needles, fold laundry  and perform surgery with steady, unshakable hands.

These aren’t novelties. They’re blueprints for who’s coming next.

The next wave won’t just follow instructions. They will adapt. Robot plumbers will sense pressure shifts and correct their torque mid-job. Robot welders will read imperfections and adjust on the fly. No smoke breaks, no paychecks, no human error. The trades have had a moment, but that moment will pass.

I say this with no pride — I come from a blue-collar family. My father and uncle built our home with their hands. They laid the floorboards, wired the walls, and set the roof beam that still holds. I was raised to honor that work. I still do. But honor won’t hold back what’s coming. Not when every hour brings a smarter machine. Not when the trade you learned becomes a line of code. AI doesn’t care how sacred a job feels. It only cares how repeatable it is. And beam by beam, line by line of code, even the most hands-on labor is being translated into machine logic. We’re not arriving at full replacement tomorrow, but we are walking toward it.

As AI becomes more sophisticated and embodied AI shifts from being a novelty to a tool, virtually every industry will feel the squeeze. Every repetitive task becomes a target. And once building a bot is cheaper than training a human, employers will pivot. They always do.

It starts small. Fewer people on the site. Fewer decisions made by hand. CAD software handles the blueprints. Laser mapping replaces tape measures. Prefab walls and plumbing sections arrive ready to install, drastically reducing the need for skilled labor on the ground. AI-assisted systems can scan a job site and flag errors before a single worker shows up. What used to take a full crew now takes half the members — or less.

For now, the tradesmen and women feast. Wages are up. Schedules are full. Good help is hard to find, and those who show up on time can name their price. It feels like a long-overdue correction. After decades of telling kids that real success comes with a necktie and student debt, the world finally seems to remember that society doesn’t run without people who can wire a house or fix a busted pipe.

But we’ve seen this movie before. In manufacturing. In agriculture. In retail. First comes the labor shortage, the golden moment. Then comes the machine. Companies don’t want to solve shortages by raising wages forever. They want scale. They want growth without people.

The trades won’t vanish, but they’ll morph beyond recognition. The plumber of 2040 might not be crawling under sinks. He’ll be managing ten AI-powered bots from a tablet, each one performing a task that once took an apprentice years to learn. The roofer may never leave the ground, piloting drones that lay shingles with laser precision. The welder might not spark metal, but adjust machine tolerances from a screen. The work will still exist, but the hands-on craft, the intuition, the mentorship may not survive the transition. The body won’t be in the loop. The trade will become another interface.

And that’s the deeper loss. Not just jobs, but meaning. For generations, the trades have offered more than a paycheck. They’ve offered identity, dignity and pride. A man like my father could point to a house and say, I built that. This kind of labor was visible. Tangible. It didn’t vanish into inboxes or spreadsheets. It stood in concrete, wood, copper and steel. But when machines lay the bricks, that pride hits a dead end. There’s nothing left to point to. The craftsmanship dies in silence. Not because it stopped mattering. But because we stopped handing it down.  

John Mac Ghlionn is a writer and researcher who explores culture, society and the impact of technology on daily life.