AI and jobs: two myths about juniors and the trades

Two ideas come up in almost every conversation I have about AI and jobs. The first is that AI can already do junior-level work, so we don't need juniors anymore. The second is that whatever happens to office work, the trades are safe: AI can write code, but it can't fix a leaking pipe.

Both sound reasonable. Both fall apart once you follow them a few steps further.

You can't hire seniors you never grew

On a spreadsheet, the case against juniors is tempting. A junior costs money, needs supervision and makes mistakes. An AI model does much of the same work faster and never needs onboarding. So give the seniors good tools and skip the juniors.

But seniors don't appear out of nowhere. Every senior engineer, architect or consultant you've worked with was once a junior. Someone hired them, let them make those mistakes, and trusted them with a little more each year. Nobody starts with ten years of experience.

Stop hiring juniors and you stop producing seniors. Nothing breaks straight away, because today's seniors are still around. The gap shows up a few years later, when they move on, retire or step into other roles, and there's nobody behind them who has learned the job. By then it can't be fixed quickly, because the only way to make a senior is still to start with a junior and give them time.

The trades are not an island

The second myth is more comforting, which is probably why it spreads. If you're a plumber, an electrician or a car mechanic, the reasoning goes, AI can't touch you, because your work is physical.

Whether or not that's true of the work itself, it misses how the business works. A tradesperson's income depends on clients, and most of those clients work in services.

Here's how big that part of the economy is, using the latest World Bank figures:

Sources: World Bank World Development Indicators, services value added (% of GDP) and employment in services (% of total employment). The employment figures are modelled estimates from the International Labour Organization (ILO). Years show the latest available data for each country as of October 2026; the US GDP share in this dataset currently stops at 2021.

In the US, the UK, the Netherlands and France, roughly four out of five working people are in services. Across the EU it's close to three out of four. In the developed world, services aren't one sector among many. They are most of the economy.

Now imagine a large part of that work gets automated and the people doing it lose their jobs. A plumber's skills are as good as they ever were, but their clients are the people who just lost their income. The work still needs doing; the money to pay for it is gone. You can't have more than 70% of people out of work and still have a functioning economy.

Everyone becomes a plumber

It gets worse. People who lose service jobs won't sit still. They'll look for work that is supposedly safe, and the obvious candidates are the same trades: plumbing, electrical work, car repair.

So supply rises exactly as demand falls. More people offer the same services to fewer people who can pay, and both prices and demand collapse.

What's left is a closed loop. The mechanic's clients are plumbers and electricians. The plumber's clients are electricians and mechanics. Everyone else can't afford any of them.

Basic income won't fill the gap

The standard answer is universal basic income (UBI): if AI takes the jobs, the state pays everyone enough to live on, and they keep calling the plumber.

I don't buy it. Even now, with most people in work and paying taxes, economies run on borrowing and struggle under their debts. A basic income at that scale would have to be funded by the same states, at the very moment most of their tax base has lost its income. It's a utopia, and I find it hard to see it happening without serious consequences.

And the closed loop of tradespeople serving each other is the optimistic scenario. The more likely outcome isn't a small economy where the plumber takes their car to the mechanic and pays by fixing the mechanic's sink. It's a global economic collapse, and unrest on a scale the world has never seen.