The Return of the American Artisan

For most of history, being an artisan was something to aspire to. The word described mastery. A person learned a craft, developed judgment through experience and eventually became capable of doing something difficult that most other people could not do. Somewhere along the way, America began to treat a large category of skilled work differently. We stopped talking about mastery and started talking about “blue-collar work.” We created an implicit hierarchy in which the successful child went to a four-year college, entered a profession and worked in an office, while the child who became an electrician, plumber, mechanic, welder or HVAC technician was too often described as having chosen an alternative path. I think we got that wrong. And the AI revolution may make the mistake impossible to ignore.

The Digital Economy Has a Very Physical Foundation

Artificial intelligence can feel almost immaterial. A prompt goes into a computer. An answer comes back. Software writes software. Models improve. Knowledge work becomes faster. But underneath that experience is an extraordinary amount of physical infrastructure. AI requires data centers. Data centers require enormous amounts of electricity. That requires generation, transmission, substations, transformers, switchgear and electricians. Servers generate extraordinary amounts of heat. That requires cooling systems, chillers, pumps, piping, controls, refrigeration expertise and technicians who understand increasingly sophisticated HVAC systems. Facilities have to be built. Equipment has to be installed. Power has to be connected. Systems have to be maintained. Something eventually breaks, and somebody has to know how to fix it.

The cloud still has a plumbing system. The AI economy still needs electricians. And the most advanced semiconductor in the world is not particularly useful if the building containing it cannot get enough power or keep it cool. This is one of the great paradoxes of the AI age. The more technologically sophisticated our economy becomes, the more important certain kinds of skilled physical work may become. The Bureau of Labor Statistics projects employment of HVAC and refrigeration mechanics and installers to grow 11 percent from 2025 through 2035, with approximately 40,600 openings each year. BLS specifically identifies commercial construction, including data centers, as a driver of that demand.

Electrician employment is projected to grow 9 percent, with roughly 72,700 openings annually. Plumbers, pipefitters and steamfitters are projected to have approximately 42,000 openings each year. These are not disappearing occupations. They are becoming strategic ones.

We Should Stop Calling These Careers a Fallback

Mike Rowe has been making versions of this argument for years. Through the mikeroweWORKS Foundation, he has tried to change the way Americans think about skilled work while providing scholarships for people entering fields including electrical work, plumbing, HVAC, construction, welding and heavy-equipment operation. In 2026, the foundation set a goal of awarding $10 million in work-ethic scholarships. The foundation’s language is intentionally provocative, but the underlying point is important: skilled trades are not merely alternatives to viable careers. They are viable careers. And increasingly, some of the country’s largest corporations appear to agree. On September 1, the Lowe’s Foundation announced a coalition of more than 75 organizations, including NVIDIA, Carrier, General Motors, AT&T, Bank of America and Duke Energy, intended to help train and develop one million people for skilled-trades careers by 2035.

Think about the combination for a moment. NVIDIA and Carrier. Artificial intelligence and air conditioning. That is not accidental. The next industrial revolution needs both.

These Are Technical Professions

Part of the problem is the language we use. “Blue collar” can make extremely technical work sound unsophisticated. Anyone who has spent time around a genuinely accomplished tradesperson knows better. A modern HVAC technician may need to understand refrigeration cycles, electrical systems, pressure, airflow, digital controls, sensors, environmental requirements and complex diagnostic equipment. A master electrician operates in a world of code requirements, load calculations, control systems, safety engineering and increasingly sophisticated power infrastructure. A licensed plumber working on complex commercial systems is not simply connecting pipes. These occupations combine formal knowledge, practical experience and judgment.

That is exactly what artisans have always done. I have seen this personally. My own family has included people who built careers around skilled physical work, including a stepfather with deep expertise in licensed cooling work. There is an enormous difference between someone who can follow instructions and someone who has spent years developing mastery of a technical system. The latter is a professional, whether or not our culture has traditionally used that word to describe the occupation. We should start treating that person like one.

College Is Valuable. It Is Not a Moral Ranking.

I should make something clear. I am a lawyer. I spent years in school. I have spent my career in a profession that requires advanced education, and I teach law students. I am not anti-college. America needs engineers, physicians, scientists, teachers, accountants, lawyers and countless other people whose careers appropriately require university education. What I reject is the idea that college belongs at the top of some hierarchy of human accomplishment. For too long, we sold a generation a remarkably simple proposition: go to college and you will be successful. The proposition became so culturally powerful that the economic questions were sometimes treated as almost impolite.

What will this education cost? What skill will I acquire? What is the likely market for that skill? What are the realistic earnings? How much debt will I incur? What alternative paths are available? Those are not anti-education questions. They are the questions any rational person should ask before making one of the largest investments of his or her life. Federal student lending substantially expanded access to higher education. That was an important achievement. But abundant financing can also weaken normal price signals. When money is readily available to purchase something, the purchaser can become less sensitive to its price and the seller can face less pressure to control that price.

Whatever one thinks about the precise role public policy played in tuition inflation, the cultural result is difficult to dispute: for decades, four-year college was marketed to millions of young Americans as the default route to economic security. Today the labor market is forcing a more complicated conversation. The Federal Reserve Bank of New York reported that in the second quarter of 2026, unemployment among recent college graduates remained about 5.6 percent and approximately 42 percent were underemployed. That does not mean a college degree has ceased to have value. It means the degree, the cost, the field of study and the alternative all matter. They always did.

There Is More Than One Path to the American Dream

I have a friend who did not attend a four-year college. He trained to operate heavy equipment. Instead of beginning his twenties with a large student-loan balance, he acquired a marketable skill and went to work. He moved relatively quickly into a six-figure income, bought a home, paid it down, acquired another property, rented it and built a family. That is not an anecdote proving everyone should operate heavy equipment. It proves something more important. There is more than one legitimate architecture for an American life.

For one person, that may be Princeton, medical school and a surgical residency. For another, it may be community college and nursing. For another, it may be an electrical apprenticeship. For another, it may be learning refrigeration and eventually owning an HVAC company. For another, it may be training on sophisticated construction equipment and earning money at twenty-one while friends are still borrowing money to attend school. The important thing is that we stop assigning social status to these choices before examining their substance. A twenty-two-year-old licensed tradesperson with no educational debt, a valuable skill and a clear path toward business ownership has not fallen behind the twenty-two-year-old college graduate. In many cases, that person may be several years ahead.

The Skilled Trades Are Also a Path to Ownership

There is another reason I think this matters. Skilled trades do not merely produce good jobs. They produce entrepreneurs. An electrician can become an electrical contractor. An HVAC technician can eventually own an HVAC company. A plumber can build a regional plumbing business. A painter can build a commercial painting company employing hundreds of people. A heavy-equipment operator can own equipment. A technician can become a manager, an owner and eventually an employer. These businesses are increasingly attracting sophisticated institutional capital precisely because many of them possess qualities investors value: recurring demand, essential services, fragmented markets, durable customer relationships and opportunities to grow through acquisition.

We have spent decades celebrating the twenty-two-year-old software founder. We should also celebrate the forty-five-year-old electrician who started with a truck and built a company employing 150 people. Both are entrepreneurs. Both create jobs. Both build things of value. The second one may simply have received less attention from the culture that decides what kind of success is fashionable.

AI Makes This a National Competitiveness Issue

There is a temptation to think of the global AI competition as a contest among computer scientists. It is not. If artificial intelligence becomes one of the defining strategic technologies of this century, the countries that win will need models, chips and software. They will also need power. Transmission. Construction. Cooling. Water infrastructure. Factories. Semiconductor facilities. Data centers. Grid modernization. And people capable of building, maintaining and repairing all of it. The United States cannot win an industrial competition with software engineers alone. The Lowe’s Foundation says an estimated 2.1 million skilled-trades positions could go unfilled by 2030 if the country does not address the labor gap. Whether the eventual number is precisely that large matters less than the direction of the problem. Employers, industry groups and government are all confronting the same constraint.

We can have extraordinary technology and abundant capital for AI infrastructure. If we do not have enough people who can actually build the infrastructure, the bottleneck eventually becomes human. The picks and shovels of the AI revolution may turn out to include wire strippers, pipe wrenches, refrigeration gauges and excavators.

Make Mastery Aspirational Again

This is ultimately about something larger than wages. People need the dignity that comes from being useful. They need skills. They need paths toward independence. They need the realistic possibility that hard work, judgment and mastery can produce a home, a family, financial security and perhaps eventually ownership of a business. For generations, the American Dream was sustained in part by people who built those lives without ever sitting in a university lecture hall. There was nothing lesser about them. They were mechanics, machinists, electricians, plumbers, builders, craftsmen and technicians. They were artisans. We should recover that word.

We should make it as respectable for a seventeen-year-old to say, “I want to become a master electrician,” as it is to say, “I want to become a software engineer.” We should make parents proud when a child chooses an apprenticeship because that path fits the child’s talents and ambitions, rather than treating it as the option that remained after college was rejected. And we should give young people honest information about both paths: the cost, the time, the earnings, the risks and the opportunities. America does not need to choose between universities and the trades.

It needs excellent universities and excellent trades. It needs lawyers and linemen. Engineers and electricians. Computer scientists and cooling specialists. The mistake was believing that one category represented advancement and the other represented something left behind. The AI age may finally teach us the opposite. The future may be digital. Its physical foundation will still have to be built, wired, cooled, maintained and repaired by people who know how things actually work.