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AI Is Coming. Becoming an Electrician Won’t Save You.
A decommissioned subway train is displayed at Transit Tech CTE High School in Brooklyn, New York. (All photos by Alex S.K. Brown for The Free Press)
White-collar workers at risk of being replaced by AI have been told to go to trade school. But is ‘learn a trade’ the new ‘learn to code’?
By River Page
04.20.26 — Tech and Business
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Chase Stephen says he’s not worried about AI coming for his job “at all.”

“I’m an electrician,” he said. Chase, 24, did what he describes as a pointless semester at Southern Virginia University. “I went for criminal justice and they gave me a bunch of random classes—English, some communications class,” he said. He dropped out and started working for the Long Island, New York, firm RMD Electric—and he has no regrets. “I have friends who went to college and now they have to get jobs in things their degrees aren’t even related to.”

If you believe the hype about the AI apocalypse, his trajectory is about to become a lot more common. “Learn a trade” has become, in the words of The Wall Street Journal, “a rallying cry,” spurred by “fears of an AI ‘jobpocalypse.’ ”

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River Page
River Page is a reporter at The Free Press.
Tags:
Technology
Trade
AI
Tech
Education
Economics
Business
Artificial Intelligence
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