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 like ten years 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.
If you do something that isn't really scalable, like being a welder or a tailor, then you only have to compete against the tailors in your neighborhood, and you can easily find a neighborhood that doesn't have a tailor. If you're building a scalable product, you'll always be competing against the best, most well funded, smartest people in the room.
Everyone here has grown up in the birth of the internet -- a once in ever event -- where building something scalable was just there for the taking. That's never going to exist again basically.
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.
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.
Switching jobs from electrician to teacher to nurse will take around 3 to 5 years of education or apprenticeship in most countries. It also requires new licenses or certificates if you ever move country.
I'm trying to respond to this stuff in good faith. Yes, I agree with you. I don't see how this is relevant to the argument. If you are in a non-scalable industry that gets taken over by technology, that sucks. My point was being in the startup game in the first place.
"Becoming a teacher" takes years.
"Becoming a successful scalable business" has no known time frame. It either happens or it doesn't. And whether it does is not particularly correlated to how much time or effort you spend on it.
>Switching jobs from electrician to teacher to nurse
The point is not to do that ever.
Just gain one of the skills like that and plant it firmly on your resume, before trying anything more risky.
Like starting a business, which might not actually cost as much or take as long to get a license.
And with no further delay needed before any future pivots, when you might need quick alternatives most.
Even if you only go back to teaching for a while to regroup.
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)
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.
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.
>how can you be sure a job is peak-automated?
Probably the best way is to spend a few years working for a company where you can get a better picture whether it seems that way or not.
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.
>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 that would always be something to fall back on if needed. Plus give you less worry about taking financial risks than you would have been considering t he 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.
> 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.
> 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.
That's not really a bad thing, IMHO. Many people successfully make a living creating niche products.
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.
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 people are good enough at math to figure it out, and you don't actually need that many clients if they are big enough.
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
> 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!
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'?
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.
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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.
>> 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?
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.
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 :)
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.
Is providing scalable products at a cheaper price scalable? If so, can it hurry up and scale? This is a bit of a paradox.
Who cares? He's arguing about providing something that is not scalable: so whatever happens to things that are scalable ain't the topic.
> 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.
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
automation makes every job scalable, no?
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.
Do you expect we’ll have AGA, artificial general automation?
I don’t see anything stopping that from happening in the very near future.
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I do. But it will take some time to get there.
That is the ultimate goal. We are very far from it for many jobs.
could you automate a BJJ coach?
Who's going to pay for a BJJ coach when nearly everyone is out of job?
I mean, if AI doesn't stall out, maybe there will be BJJ bots in 10 years.
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.
can you automate a tailor?
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.
Isn't tailors by and large already outcompeted by cheap new clothes?
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.)
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)
I mean, you do you.
Clothing is really _fashion_ for tons of people. Fashion is art. People like art.
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.
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.
Yes, your message is coming from the pov of economics and business, as makes sense in this thread! That's my mistake, I took your message more sentimentally. I've used tailoring probably 5 times in my life, with the only recurring need being to hem pants.
"There is no money in tailoring" seems right. It's the "not all things need to make maximum $$$" that I speak to. You didn't pick this fight though, I did heh.
My (successful) friend tells me all about how amazing it is to collect very expensive watches. I just need to be a "watch guy" and I'll come to understand. Once my eyes returned from rolling out of my head, I did concede a great point he made: there is no reason for watch makers to exist anymore. The fantastically amazing history and evolution of time-keeping and personal time-pieces is now purely supported by rich people that care to subsidize the art form. And so, maybe I really do aspire to be a watch guy after all... hmm.
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.
Not if you want any tailoring to be done.
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.
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.
> but tailors aren't even operating in that market.
Not anymore.
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".