Home electricians will always be fine. But if you work under a manager, I guarantee you some in your business will start to use AI to micromanage you if nothing is done. Hopefully I'm too negative.
I sell and run electrical work and I don’t see any good use for LLMs for what I do on a day to day basis.
LLMs don’t understand constructions drawings so they’re no help when it comes to doing a takeoff. Construction specifications are already well-organized and able to be searched so LLMs don’t help there.
They can’t synthesize information from different sources (words from a person spoken on a phone conversation, napkin sketches, information that is embedded in an electricians head about a specific facility, etc) or coordinate multiple parties through a variety of communication methods (email, text, phone calls, RFIs, in-person meetings, etc)
About the only use I’ve found for them in my line of work is cleaning up data from outside sources. YMMV. Construction is a very relationship and trust based business that has been around longer than almost every other profession.
That's arguably the most interesting about the discussion on LLMs. Can't they reason? If they do, reason is an emerging fonction. 2 years ago, before inference was truly added to LLMs,a Honk Kong university paper wrote that ChatGPT 3.5 reasoning was correct 64% of the time on a specific task (you asked it to make the same reasonning 100 time, 36% of the time it would be wrong for no reason). I'd like to see how modern LLMs with added inference matrices and a lot of helpers before the actual transformers perform on this test.
If a consensus arrives in 5 years and we decided that yes, LLMs can in fact reason, reasonning would be an emerging capacity, and that would be incredibly interesting.
I don’t think LLMs have zero applications, I just haven’t found any for my specific use cases. If someone is able to figure out a way for LLMs to interpret construction drawings, it would be immensely useful, I’d be able to price substantially more work.
I think back to a 1991-1992 when someone stood over my shoulder watching and telling me what a waste of time it was and who they hell is ever going to use it :)). I remind them from time to time and we have a good laugh.
Maybe, but with youtube I ran the service entry, underground secondary, a multi-structure multi-panel electrical system distribution and the residential inside. I have zero electrician training.
Our county eliminated building codes, licensing requirements, and inspections so now everybody just does it themselves. The electricians here are going to the wayside unless they work for the power company. Us 'DIYers' have mostly replaced them by sharing knowledge and accumulating the wealth of knowledge prior held tightly by tradesman who have attempted to overplay their hand by charging exorbitant rates and refusing to hiring apprentices and are at a dead end.
Doesn't seem like much. We eliminated electrical (and other) inspections and paperwork 20+ years ago and none of the paranoid delusions of the nay-sayers came true.
All else equal it seems healthier for society to have a strong professional electrician trade, but if an area is struggling to have that, it definitely seems better to have the DIY knowledge publicly available. Somebody has to keep the electrical working!
