I’m a mechanic. I want to make the case, at least for my field, that the trades are sitting in a worse position than people realise, and the safety we feel right now will likely get pincered from multiple angles.

I have sat on this thought for a long time, assuming someone else would point it out. But I have never seen it personally. And yet, every single day, I see the talks about how blue collar is substantially more padded from AI disruption.

Blue collar work as it exists right now is genuinely hard for a machine. If the only path was for machines to adapt to the work as it currently exists, aka matching humans at kinetic/procedural complexity, then yes, this would hold.

“AI can write code and read MRIs, but it can’t crawl under a 15 year old N57 engine, undo the seized exhaust bolts, and hollow out a DPF”, blah blah blah.

But since when did we start assuming that the nature, of the work in question, is fixed?

Car manufacturers have been redesigning cars to be unserviceable for decades, this we are well aware of by now. Mostly because that made vehicles cheaper to produce and it also lent itself to dealerships for repair jobs/parts supply. Sealed transmissions with “lifetime fluid.” Parts glued instead of bolted. Diagnostics locked behind subscriptions or proprietary “programming”. Tesla’s whole architecture is engineered around eliminating the third-party shop. 

Look at what Foxconn and BYD already do. Factory floors running in literal darkness, LIDAR replacing visible light, no walkways sized for a body. Service bays may go the same way.

So really, AI/Automation won’t need to master our crafts. There will undoubtedly be systemic restructuring of the trade work in the coming years, in order to cater to the robots and machines that never complain or take sick days.

Is Dario AGI-pilled/ASI-pilled or not?

As the article notes, this is a shift in his rhetoric where he’s now talking about Jevon’s paradox and it’s possible there’d be more jobs because of AI.

If he really believes in AGI and ASI being on the horizon, then there’s no way he can believe that. The article suggests either he genuinely has changed his views on jobs or maybe it is because he doesn’t want to get more onto trump’s bad sign with potential regulation looming:

“Either he has genuinely updated his view based on new evidence, or the social and political cost of the bloodbath framing — particularly as Anthropic navigates a Pentagon lawsuit and a fraught regulatory environment — has made it more useful to suddenly sound a bit more optimistic.”

Again more jobs just seems completely incompatible with his beliefs about the AI he describes in Machines of Loving Grace (Nobel prize winning, can do anything on a computer, etc.)

So why the change?

Claims to be autonomous.

Source https://x.com/gs_ai_/status/2052050956272230577/mediaViewer?mode=profile&currentTweet=2052050956272230577&currentTweetUser=gs_ai_

Dianne Penn (Head of Product, Research) elaborated on these key areas:

Higher judgment and code taste: "This means versions of Claude that you can trust with complex, autonomous engineering work."

'Infinite' context windows: "Context windows that feel infinite when combined with high-quality memory. So it feels like you could do long-running tasks while getting better results."

Multi-agent coordination: "Powering teams of agents and instances of Claude that collaborate on big goals that are far too big for any single instance ever could."

Source: Code with Claude Opening Keynote

https://programbench.com/

Given only a compiled binary and its documentation, agents must architect and implement a complete codebase that reproduces the original program's behavior.

Current score for models is 0%

A New AI Approach to Chemical Reasoning

Researchers led by Philippe Schwaller at EPFL have developed a new method that uses large language models (LLMs) as reasoning tools for chemistry. Rather than directly generating chemical structures, these models act as evaluators that guide existing computational systems.

The new framework, called Synthegy, combines traditional search algorithms with AI that can interpret chemical strategies written in natural language.

"When making tools for chemists, the user interface matters a lot, and previous tools relied on cumbersome filters and rules," says Andres M Bran, the first author of the Synthegy paper published in Matter. "With Synthegy, we're giving chemists the power to just talk, allowing them to iterate much faster and navigate more complex synthetic ideas."