6 ms·

So, I really felt like more people should be reading Nassim Taleb's Incerto series of books. A lot of the issues that fall out of AI he dealt with in his books

• femiagbabiaka 8mo ago
  automation makes every job scalable, no?
  • pier25 8mo ago
    can you automate a tailor?
    • Epa095 8mo ago
      Isn't tailors by and large already outcompeted by cheap new clothes?
      • dolebirchwood 8mo ago
        A big point of seeing a tailor is getting yourself fitted for custom clothing that is specifically made just for you. As someone who's bought $200 off-the-rack suits and $2,000 tailor-made suits, there's a world of difference between the two, especially when you have an atypical body type. (Granted, to the main point, I still think a tailor could be automated in some distant future, but we'll need robots to perform physical interactions, not just software.)
        • bubblewand 8mo ago
          Tailors are a niche thing for weirdos, now. It's not exactly a growth market. Most folks only wear a suit to weddings and funerals, and maybe job interviews. They have basically no need for more than two suits, and many try to get by with just one (in black, probably). Lots don't own one at all, maybe just a cheap fused-construction blazer or two, if even that. Outright bespoke clothes are a niche of a niche. Normal people wear clothes containing minimum 2% elastic and perhaps never, ever visit a tailor in their whole lives, except maybe one at a tux rental place or a wedding dress store, for their own wedding. If they repair clothes, it's sewing on the odd button at home or using iron-on denim patches. Past that, it's just not worth fixing, normal folks' clothes are so cheap. The whole market for tailors is practically an affectation. It's not serving much actual need any more, not from the perspective of the overwhelming majority of people who are happy with stretch-denim jeans and polyester sportswear jackets and such. It's basically 99% of the way to being an obsolete job, kept from total death by a few enthusiasts. Only a bit more lively than the market for, say, authentic regency-era footwear or something like that. (I am a fellow weirdo, for the record)
          • apsurd 8mo ago
            I mean, you do you. Clothing is really _fashion_ for tons of people. Fashion is art. People like art.
            • debatem1 8mo ago
              As someone who has tried to make several businesses around art, people generally like art but not enough to pay "at scale" money for it.
            • bubblewand 8mo ago
              Yes, I am one of the people who has a preferred tailor who can do more than just let trousers waists out. I also know where the nearest cobbler is. That’s not normal, though. A dead industry often doesn’t entirely disappear, it just shrinks a bunch and comes to rely entirely on enthusiasts or very rare actual need, rather than broad need or appeal. Consider the draft horse breeder, or the carriage driver. There’s a market for both professions! But they’re itty-bitty. The day-to-day need for both is gone. Tailoring is hovering right in the edge of that kind of status, today. It’s dying, killed by $10-30 shirts and $20-50 trousers and $50-100 jackets all from largely synthetic materials, and a society that no longer expects anyone to wear anything “fancier” outside certain events. I mean, outside very unusual circles, dinner jackets are essentially ceremonial costume-wear, and business suits aren’t far behind on that track. You gonna wear a tailored wool hacking jacket or breathable linen Norfolk suit on your camping trip, or a bunch of polyester and nylon stuff from REI? LOL. All the situational tailored clothing but the business suit and blazer are near-extinct unless you want to look like a cosplayer, and those are on borrowed time.
      • layer8 8mo ago
        Not if you want any tailoring to be done.
      • bilbo0s 8mo ago
        cheap new clothes Uh.. I don't mean to be that guy, but tailors aren't even operating in that market. People who use tailors aren't interested in off the rack items. Even when they do purchase off the rack or even secondhand items.. they'll go have some of those items tailored.
        • Epa095 8mo ago
          > but tailors aren't even operating in that market. Not anymore.
          • bilbo0s 8mo ago
            Not any time that most of us have even been alive. It's been well over half a century since tailors operated in the "cheap clothing" market. The clothes tailors make have, pretty much, always been expensive relative off the rack department store options. Probably because tailor made clothing doesn't "scale".
      • UltraSane 8mo ago
        Rich people still get suits custom made specifically to their measurements and preferences. They cost about $20,000 USD. It would be cool to have this process automated and affordable to the masses.
      • scoofy 8mo ago
        A huge part of the tailoring business are making small adjustments to cheap clothing to get them 90% of the way to bespoke. If you’ve never done it, I strongly recommend getting your jackets tailored. Even a casual jacket will fit and look non-trivially better for $50-$100 and an afternoon at your local tailor. You can even get things like cycling gear tailored.
    • ansgri 8mo ago
      Absolutely. Design parametric families of patterns, 3d-scan the person, let customer adjust with live preview, laser cut, then fully automated or low-skill assembly. Probably not currently economical like many things involving physical world manipulation, but without obvious roadblocks.
    • insane_dreamer 8mo ago
      yes but is there enough demand for tailoring that it would make it economically feasibly to create the investment to automate it? probably not. and in a world where many/most(?) people have lost their jobs to AI, only the wealthy few will be able to afford tailoring anyway
  • kardashev8 8mo ago
    could you automate a BJJ coach?
    • AntiDyatlov 8mo ago
      I mean, if AI doesn't stall out, maybe there will be BJJ bots in 10 years.
    • handzhiev 8mo ago
      Who's going to pay for a BJJ coach when nearly everyone is out of job?
      • aatd86 8mo ago
        You will probably have time related free credits for AI usage. The more you sell stuff that are in demand and ship fast, the higher price you can command. Otherwise you just get basic income. People will have to be creative. Creativity doesn't scale to machines. Creative decision making has too many branches. So time based costs for product manufacturing and procurement. Everyone will barter again in a sense. Better money circulation. Those who just want entertainment can also do nothing. But entertainment will be a more important field. Already the case with tiktok, everyone is becoming an interntainer(sic) these days. You have things such as the police olympics so to speak in the UAE... :) So coaching people, personal improvement, wellness, will be good fields to be in.
    • femiagbabiaka 8mo ago
      IMO literally automating the job isn't the only possible scenario -- already in the weightlifting space coaches are supplying skills and system prompts to llms that do their training for them, massively raising the number of students they can train at at time -- at some point that turns training into a zero sum game
  • pphysch 8mo ago
    Even if it does, there will probably be a prolonged economic period where robots are doing dangerous/messy stuff like welding, plumbing but there is a human master guiding them from a few yards away, via prompts, controllers, etc. More of a semi-autonomous power tool than an fully autonomous master that is delivered by drone on-demand. Scalability is still a ways off.
  • layer8 8mo ago
    Do you expect we’ll have AGA, artificial general automation?
    • lukan 8mo ago
      I do. But it will take some time to get there.
    • jimbokun 8mo ago
      I don’t see anything stopping that from happening in the very near future.
      • deleted 8mo ago
        [deleted]
    • femiagbabiaka 8mo ago
      I don't think it needs to be general to be scalable to the point that it causes previously safe industries to "race to the bottom" Uber didn't need to launch in every neighborhood to start destroying the taxi business Facebook didn't need to have every eyeball on the internet in order to massively disrupt trad advertising At some point there's just a tipping point
  • UltraSane 8mo ago
    That is the ultimate goal. We are very far from it for many jobs.
  • scoofy 8mo ago
    If we get AGI and fully autonomous robot assistants, we'll live in a post scarcity world like Star Trek, or somebody in control the robots will use them to enslave all of humanity... so... high variance outcome could go either way.
    • insane_dreamer 8mo ago
      given the history of humanity, the post-scarcity world of Star Trek seems highly unlikely
• agentifysh 8mo ago
  This seems overly pessimistic As scalability becomes more accessible like with coding agents The less it becomes about money but distribution While money can buy you the latter it may not compound to something that is sustainable
• pier25 8mo ago
  > if you are going to do something for a living, make sure it is NOT scalable I guess it also means that if you build something for a niche audience then big companies will never be interested in it.
  • rwbt 8mo ago
    That's not really a bad thing, IMHO. Many people successfully make a living creating niche products.
    • InexSquirrel 8mo ago
      I wouldn't say it's not really a bad thing, I think it's a very good thing. There are many people now making incredibly niche products that have very good lives - making more than enough money for themselves doing interesting work engaging with customers that are passionate about their field. Sounds like a great life to me.
  • fuzzfactor 8mo ago
    I like doing things for big companies that they actually could afford easily, but their costs are so high it's a better deal to have me do it. One of my favorite niches :) Some clients are good enough at math to figure it out, and you don't actually need that many of them if they are big enough.
    • pier25 8mo ago
      how do you approach big companies to offer them these custom niche services?
      • fuzzfactor 8mo ago
        Good question. One early approach when starting to build a reputation is to work as a subcontractor to a less-big company who has already gone through everything to be on the approved-vendor list of the massive corporation. Even better if the less-big company is a private company and the biggie is public. A private company will be able to figure out the benefit from your work better than most, and hopefully profit from it. I like it when every time I invoice a client, they are making money at the same time, whether they are making it from me is not always necessary if I am participating in an overall money-making process they are going through. Especially routinely. It's just fine to be a very small participant in lots of activity going on between the big-shots. Big companies can have so much work and be able to pay so well that your position can be to merely absorb the overflow from the primary contractor, even if you do not yet have a unique offering. Then it's good to build into your exclusive-but-related niche, which would be intended for a different division of the biggie and expect it to languish unless your already-established client can use that too. Eventually after you finally get to meet the right person in the target corporate division, it will be after you have already been doing work for that same corporation through the approved primary contractor. By this point you've already been doing critical work for that corporation exactly like they need, that you can be proud of and point to, and it can be a whole lot more likely to become an approved vendor yourself. From which position you can finally negotiate fees directly with the most well-heeled corporate source, this would be the first time if you were only working for other primary contractors until then. Ideally you will then be invoicing a different office of the same corporation that you were subcontracting under, there will be no conflict of interest, and you can continue working for the original primary contractor too. And your most promising niche finally gets to launch with about as much upside as it can get.
• gzread 8mo ago
  That's also the advice of the founder of this website, but not his investment firm since it's looking for moonshots. https://paulgraham.com/ds.html https://paulgraham.com/ds.html
• ineedasername 8mo ago
  That seems like reasonable advice until you realize you have no idea what will and will not scale in a few years, and there's only so many tailors/plumbers/welders/etc. What it really comes down to is these options as more work gets automated: 1) New jobs doing different things that weren't done before 2) Same jobs but shorter hours so "full time" with a salary to match starts to look more like 4 days, or 5 hours/day, or something. 3) Lots of unemployment These can happen in a lot of different combinations, they can come wrapped up in different ways, and unequally for different segments of the workforce, but there's limited elasticity in most areas where additional people piling into the field would create more demand rather than glut the supply to the supplier's detriment.
  • scoofy 8mo ago
    The point of doing something non-scalable is that you can enter and exit the market fairly easily. You don't need to be a tailor your whole life. You can make a living as a barber, electrician, teacher, or nurse. I'm not saying it's easy! It's hard as hell. It sucks when your job gets automated. I'm just saying that aiming for something non-scalable means you're not always tilting at windmills, and the game can't be rigged against you.
    • XorNot 8mo ago
      All of those professions you've listed require about half a decade of dedicated training to be legally allowed to practice. For example an electrician takes like 7 years to become qualified, that's a full time apprenticeship, and it pays badly in the meantime. A fact endlessly annoying to electrical engineers who legally can design their houses power system but not work on it. (I mean I think a barber is quicker, but one of that list is also not like the others)
      • scoofy 8mo ago
        I'm not trying to say 'everything is fine, nothing bad is happening a world of recurring technology and industrial revolutions.' It's not. The way things are set up is bad. My point is the author writes a column about how GPTs are ruining the ability for people to make scalable products, because when everyone can make one, nobody cares... my point is that that's not the result of GPTs. It's a result of survivorship bias skewing how we look at things. When your business is a flywheel than needs to be running to provide a benefit to each user, then getting that flywheel running is a huge problem. The vast majority of non-scalable businesses, almost by definition, provide each customer with a benefit regardless of whether anyone else uses it. That is how you create basic, word-of-mouth, free "earned" marketing.
• a_better_world 8mo ago
  how good was Taleb at following his own advice? Had he tested it? As I recall he is pretty big on "skin in the game' as his differentiator.
  • fraaancis 8mo ago
    He kind of did. He used leverage to place bets on the market. Leverage scales in a way, because larger pools of money (corporations, groups of investors) mean larger bets. But leverage also doesn't scale, because larger pools of money tend to make smaller bets over a larger surface of the market, since being wrong in a big way with leverage can wipe you out.
• laurex 8mo ago
  I'm excited for a future where the technologist is like the tailor in their community. Scaling software has created a host of 'product traps' and there is no need for that for the vast number of activities people do aided by technology.
• Buttons840 8mo ago
  Is providing scalable products at a cheaper price scalable? If so, can it hurry up and scale? This is a bit of a paradox.
  • TacticalCoder 8mo ago
    Who cares? He's arguing about providing something that is not scalable: so whatever happens to things that are scalable ain't the topic.
• laffOr 8mo ago
  Being a tailor is scalable, that's way there are way, way more cheap machine produced clothes today than in the past. Surely he did not miss that the textile industry was at the core of industrial revolution. So being a tailor is more like a post-scaling job - the automation has already happened and now there are only remnants left. But how can you be sure a job is peak-automated? A few years ago, I would have said musicians are post-scaling - way fewer musicians jobs now that you can play recorded music. But it looks like generative AI will hit musicians again. Can some of welding be automated? Probably.
  • scoofy 8mo ago
    I mean a tailor who adjusts clothes and occasionally makes something bespoke. Tailors typically operate a launderette and act as middlemen to a local dry cleaner. I’m not talking about a fancy man making clothes for rich people, I’m talking about the talented old lady in you neighborhood who adjusts your clothing for $50 and runs a wash and fold.
    • fuzzfactor 8mo ago
      >Can some of welding be automated? Huge amounts have been doing it for decades. Manual work pays better than ever though. And plenty of alterations going on all the time after all the automation dust had settled manufacturing most fashions, a lot less manual work is of course being done but it's still everywhere. You do have to be good or you're not going to do half as well as you could though. The thing is, automation should be expected to slow or stall sooner or later, automation's not suitable for every little bit of welding or sewing that needs to keep going on. Only the most suitable, of course ;) These are just random examples, if you want to make absolutely sure you won't be automated away by the internet, build a valuable skill that doesn't depend on the internet at all, nor look anywhere near the places where automation is emerging that it wasn't doing before. If you eventually figure out how to automate that skill it would be something. Just like the internet though, there can be extra credit for being first :) One of the most valuable things to be able to build single-handedly is something that can not be mass-produced by any stretch of the imagination. You might stick with that alone, or pivot to something with more of a financial upside, but you would always have something to fall back on if needed. Plus give you less worry about taking financial risks than you would have been, considering the same resources and/or capital to work with. And on a regular basis revisit how far you can stretch your imagination to see if your baseline fallback still doesn't look like it will ever be automated in a way that would effect you.
• throwaway150 8mo ago
  > if you are going to do something for a living, make sure it is NOT scalable. Great advice but difficult to action though. I mean 10 years back I'd have thought programming is that thing which is not scalable. I had every reason to believe that. It required skill, experience, ability to stay current, grit for debugging hard stuff. Much of it can be automated now. What can I pick now for a living that is not scalable today that some future technology would automate it just as easily.
  • tuatoru 8mo ago
    You never wrote any scripts to write code?
• HoldOnAMinute 8mo ago
  >> you'll always be competing against the best, most well funded, smartest people in the room What if your goal is for them to buy you out?
  • scoofy 8mo ago
    There are much less expensive ways of playing the lottery than investing a year of you life into an unprofitable product that must be scaled to be successful, and only then hoping gets bought by a direct competitor.
  • fuzzfactor 8mo ago
    Don't compete, complement and start building the relationship from the beginning. Plus, who wants to spend any time competing with the stongest contender anyway, especially to get started :)
• amelius 8mo ago
  > He gives one the best pieces of advice I've ever heard: if you are going to do something for a living, make sure it is NOT scalable. You mean like opening a restaurant? Too bad delivery services like Uber Eats totally own the market now. Starting a hotel? Booking.com and Airbnb are there to take your profit margins away!
  • InexSquirrel 8mo ago
    I think that delivery services give you bigger market, but not intrinsic scale. You're still limited by kitchen size, staff numbers, and raw hours you can put into the food. You can scale the system (say Subway, or even smaller chains like Burger Fuel), but also reasonably choose _not_ to scale and still do incredibly well (like Michelin star restaurants, or the myriad of hyper-famous-locally Japanese eateries, or Fergburger in Queenstown). Someone scaling their own restaurant on the other side of the world won't necessarily out compete out (and in the overwhelming majority of cases with have no impact at all). Despite fast food joints all over the place, I still see small cafes, individual eateries, etc performing well (I mean, as well as hospitality can be). Maybe it's worth expanding the definition of > make sure it is NOT scalable < to include 'make sure it's not automatable'?
    • amelius 8mo ago
      The problem is that any market can be taken over by someone with deep pockets (or investors making a pile of money). They just make sure they are the "go-to place" for consumers to access the market. By marketing the hell out of it, by making apps, abusing power in other markets (see platforms), etc.
  • nicbou 8mo ago
    Yes and any other business has to play the Google Maps and SEO game.
• darth_avocado 8mo ago
  > if you are going to do something for a living, make sure it is NOT scalable You need to consider both horizontal and vertical scaling. Being a bespoke tailor may not scale vertically, but it can scale horizontally. If you have too many people pick up tailoring, you might run out of neighborhoods without competitors.
• deleted 8mo ago
  [deleted]
• mrkpdl 8mo ago
  I used to look at my local dry cleaner and think that it had to be the most stable business going - it couldn’t be replaced by a computer. Then Covid hit, work from home took off, and the dry cleaner went out of business. Computers came for the dry cleaner, not by cleaning clothes but by eliminating the need for dress codes.
• webel0 8mo ago
  Welding is coming along. Ever heard of Path Robotics? That's high-mix, high-complexity welds. (There are a lot of other, less-sophisticated welding robots out there.) The biggest moat for a welder right now is special certifications to be able to do welds on submarines, etc.
• gverrilla 8mo ago
  stupid advice. only way to solve the problem is collective. even if you become a tailor or a welder, what about other people? it's not a singleplayer game at all.
• thegrim33 8mo ago
  It's so interesting the amount of people with these big AI fears who think that AI is going to replace most knowledge work within a short period of time, singularity, etc., but that same AI that takes over everything .. isn't going to be smart enough to operate robotics to do plumbing or welding? Those things will be outside the limits of its intelligence?
• nerdsniper 8mo ago
  New laser welders from xTool lower the barrier to entry for welding to nearly the floor. They basically automatically push the welder tip along at the perfect rate for excellent welds, and get super deep penetration / full fusion welds every time with very little skill. It will be difficult to know what career is ‘safe’…especially if everyone floods into it because it’s one of the last decent-paying jobs left (it wont pay well for long if everyone else loses their jobs).