But I'd be very careful about which trade to pick, some may also become redundant in the future. I suppose some new technical jobs will be created to maintain the automation, but not as much to compensate for the job loss.

so true

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They constantly try to escape from the darkness outside and within
Dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good T.S. Eliot

I am president and part owner of a mechanical contracting firm. We have 6 guys who are sub 30 earning just below 6 figures who served their apprenticeship and schooling through us (i.e. No student loans education was paid for)

If I could find 6 more good ones today I would hire them

Sad to say that those 6 probably don't really even have to be all that good....just show up to work on time, every day with an appetite/aptitude to learn, able to accept criticism/correction while learning, understanding what a commitment means and a decent attitude that doesn't scream I AM SPECIAL.

yep. Most of them in the trades fit that category. I just cant find enough of them. The ones who are good, by their mid 30's transition into the office as sales/project managers making low 6 figures for 30 years working 40 and saving their bodies from wear and tear. The others make low 6 figures with healthy pension and benefits and retire from the field in mid to late 50's after 30-35 years.

All live solid middle class life on 1 income, upper middle if they have dual income. If their spouse is teacher, nurse etc etc. they are sitting very pretty by 30ish YO.

Actually if most employers could get workers like that they would say they are pretty good. Maybe I am saying the same thing you said?

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They constantly try to escape from the darkness outside and within
Dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good T.S. Eliot

We are same

They are for the most part very good just not enough of

Too many are off getting 6 figure student loans while these are making 40k while school is paid for (5 yr apprenticeship) and 60k immediately after with OT and good benes

I don't see the large influx of East Asians that are coming to the SF Bay Area leaving anytime soon. They are putting down roots and bringing over the entire extended family.

I've been a system administrator for 25 years. We started with big expensive servers and operators would load tapes all night to back them up. Every disk failure meant spending all night replacing it and laboriously restoring the data by manually loading many backup tapes. It took a lot of people to take care of them. Then disks got cheap enough to mirror our data and we got robotic tape loaders so backups and restores could run unattended so we didn't need as many people. Then moving storage from servers to SANs allowed us to improve performance and reliability so we needed even fewer people. Then we started to use virtualization for most of our servers so almost all repairs and maintenance could be done online with no downtime so we needed even fewer people. Now we are moving to the cloud and soon most of us will be out of a job.

There really isn't any end to it. Amazon and similar stores will put most local salesmen out of business. Self-driving trucks will replace truckers. Why have local warehouses when you can overnight anything from across the country?