When Jeffrey and I were at Singularity University, we used to comment on the fact that the average plumber in Silicon Valley made about as much (and sometimes more) money than the average software engineer. The same was (and is) true for many other trades. Plus – try to get a plumber to come to your house if you live in the Bay Area and you’ll experience first hand how hard it is to even find one. Nvidia’s CEO Jensen Huang just made the same point:
“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,” Huang told Channel 4 News in the U.K. in late 2025. “The skilled craft segment of every economy is going to see a boom. You’ve going to have to be doubling and doubling and doubling every single year.”
Aside from him potentially being right – it’s kinda sad to think we live in a world where the value of human labor is to keep the machines running. Brave New World indeed.
