Blue-collar jobs at risk from automation?

I am very sceptical about this. It is true that journalists are on average much smarter than blue-collar workers but I doubt that most of the latter are at greater risk of being replaced by automation.

Take this bit of work I had to do recently as an example. A house had a power outage after heavy rain. First I locate the problem (turned out an outdoor plug became permeable). Then I had to get a ladder to climb up a fence in order to reach the plug; cut some creeper to unplug it; sufficiently dry it; reset the fuse.

Clearly this job doesn't need journalist level intelligence to complete but a formally labelled data set for problems like this would be hard to find and these would be needed to train your machine learning algorithm.

In essence, blue-collar work is clunky and messy and more often than not, poorly defined. In terms of problem degree, it is definitely AI-hard. For those out of the loop, this means making the computer as intelligent as a person otherwise known as strong AI.