I believe this is exactly the kind of high-paying job that is difficult for AI to replace.
Mechanical timepieces are a luxury item, and these students are essentially artists in training. Wrist time was solved in the late 1970's with the commoditization of quartz movements. These 'jobs' will get replaced by AI at approximately the same pace as your local sculptor.
I don't know if watchmaking is one of them, but there are a bunch of traditional crafts which are actually approaching a danger point because there aren't enough up-and-coming acolytes in the discipline to replace them, even though the craft still enjoys enough popular support to have a thriving economy.<p>Anecdotally, I see enough mechanical watches on wrists and in duty-free shops that I imagine there's enough of a pipeline there for at least one school. Much like vinyl records it doesn't appear to actually be going away even if it's superfluous.
Come to think of it, it makes sense; in this day and age, every industry is evolving so rapidly that the future remains quite uncertain.
I am literally wearing a watch right now that was produced without any of these artisans’ specialized labor and which boasts among its features access to AI.<p>In a very real sense I have replaced use of the skills of watchmakers with AI.<p>Sorry about that. To be fair most watchmakers were already put out of work by quartz oscillators and integrated circuits in the 1980s.
The reason that you bought your watch and the reason that other people buy these hand crafted mechanical watches are very, very different. Once upon a time, utility used to be what necessitated an accurate movement, and it came at great cost because of the skill, knowledge, precision, and artistic talent needed to make one; this justified further embellishing the movement with a beautiful case and band because it would be in poor taste to make something that is both expensive and ugly when your primary consumers would be aristocrats. Eventually timepieces became commodified as industrialization made their manufacture feasible at a larger scale, and later then the advent of the quartz crystal made mechanical movements functionally obsolete as a means of telling time accurately. Approaching perfect timekeeping in a mechanical movement is not meant to be utilitarian, but rather a practice in artistry. Mechanical watches are jewelry, and jewelry irrationally commands the price that any luxury does because it's a matter of taste and not utility. Nobody buying a Patek Philippe is doing so because they want millisecond accuracy via atmoic clock GPS signals - they buy Seikos for that.
I think the fact that you can have a compact device on your wrist that accurately keeps time all without any battery or circuitry is really remarkable as well. Moreover that the “technology superior” smart watches are kind of distracting and don’t have a great deal of use value. My watch tells the time and the date, that’s really all I need it for
Yet most people in the watch industry will suggest that the Apple Watch was a boon for the industry because it retrained people to wear a watch, a fashion that was being abandoned.
you need AI to tell the time?
Not really. No one wants a Rolex or Omega with ChatGPT in it.
Correct, AI will not replathe 3 high-paying watch maker jobs that exist. You are the best kind of correct, technically. But you are distracting from the fact that most people aren't doing anything even remotely physical related in the space that some people posit will be decimated by AI: white-collar jobs where you are a keyboard jockey all day.
I have a friend who got an English and Creative Writing degree from a liberal arts college, and then immediately went back to trade school for band instrument repair. It's not particularly lucrative, as trades go, but it does seem a lot more future proof than most careers.
I recently left my career as a software engineer to train to become a violin maker. Couldn't be happier.
Haha, so you're going to do something AI can't replace, right?
Thinking about it. I'm pretty attracted to the idea of a career with some kind of protectionist licensing system, like doctor or actuary, but that may just be staving off the inevitable. Might teach high school.<p>After I got laid off in the US, I moved to a mountain town in New Zealand planning on being a ski lift operator while I think about the future, but got a software developer job by accident instead.
Yes, and it's a great example of an industry that was completely decimated by automation - you can get a functional watch for a fiver, whereas back when every watch was handmade and a de-facto inheritance piece.<p>But bespoke, handmade, high value, low volume stuff is still around.
Sure but it’s also a microscopically small component of the country’s overall economy.
I don't know how high paying it is, although I can see how it <i>can be</i>, especially given there is a shortage of watchmakers in the developed world, even in Switzerland.
Basically anything that is a luxury good is probably safe from AI. If people are buying it for status or high performance reasons, they aren’t going to pick the low end AI slop version.
Unless they’re replaced by humans controlled by AI(look at the various research for BCIs or for gene therapy that allows for the possibility for you to be controlled by radio frequencies), then they’re very easily replaced.