Hacker News Reader

Comment by ineedasername | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

I keep hearing about the potential of "new jobs" coming from ai but can anyone actually describe one? My gut says they will be something similar to converting middle class knowledge workers to do DoorDash drivers or trained artists becoming dog groomers. What a cool future, at least my parent's can watch racist ai slop videos on their iPads.

It's simply a case of looking back and deciding this technical revolution is identical to the ones preceding it. Thus jobs destroyed will be replaced with new jobs, it always happens that way.

Of course past performance is no guarantee of future success...

> jobs destroyed will be replaced with new jobs

Not for horses though, or at least not the majority of them. Some were kept as pets or essentially status objects. In this case we are the horses.

> In this case we are the horses.

This is assuming the conclusion. The entire question is whether we are the horses or every other example of humans in the past who found other employment that was inconceivable previous to the technological revolution that rendered their old job irrelevant.

But you are ignoring the substantial difference between previous technical revolutions, this time technology not replacing a mechanical operation.

And glue, you forgot glue. Maybe we'll get the Matrix plot line where we become human glue. Or, uh, batteries.

Horses couldn't revolt.

And we won’t. Uber Eats Burger Reich and all.

95% of human farmers lost their jobs because of industrial revolution. What happened then? No jobs were created and we still have 95% unemployment, right?

Horses don't pay tax. The reason we have jobs is to pay tax.

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.

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.

There are a lot of code issues you can run into when actually installing and repairing wiring that your average EE wouldn’t know much about at all. And just because you can design the power system for a building doesn’t mean you have any how to fish romex through a wall.

That’s like saying a mechanical engineer should necessarily be able to work as a machinist. Some of them can for sure, but it’s not something they are required to learn.

Also in many places anyone can do electrical work on their own house.

Half a decade is over in a flash. The current software engineering downturn is almost 3 years old now.

> For example an electrician takes like 7 years to become qualified

Using a similar playbook for what happened to SE (loads of good ~free info, bootcampification) you can drastically reduce the time to be economically useful, but that can only go for so long due to saturation. Especially residential electric work (or other trades) is no witchcraft that would require anywhere near several years of education/practice. And yeah, the legal system would have to cooperate, which will only happen when the pressure becomes high enough (see e.g. debates around "Meisterpflicht" in Germany).

That said if AI continues to progress like it currently does we may not get to that part.

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.

Almost typed the same thing in different words at the same time :)

Your above point can not be upvoted enough.

You do have to wonder what some people are thinking ;)

Good message from Taleb too, he may not be the most likeable or agreeable person in the world, but he is quite brilliant at synthesizing logical meaning from the inputs he does have.

People not liking Taleb and then dismissing him because he can be rude has always been one of the strangest things that so many people do.

I remember about halfway through Skin in the Game, after being put off by most of what I'd been reading, that the gestalt shift happened and it finally clicked. It's probably one of the best texts I've ever read on a specific type of conservatism. I don't like that I agreed with it, but the guy makes a very, very convincing argument.

Where would we be without Linus anyway ;)

>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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com