Taleb says AI will deal a heavy blow to white-collar professions; indigo adds the judgment that incremental jobs will drop to zero
indigo relays Taleb's consecutive posts on X: all professions called white-collar and the middle-class dream will be hit hard by AI, faster than expected, and all the jobs invented in the 20th century are under threat. Taleb believes the problem is not how smart AI is, but that too many adults are mechanical, follow the crowd, lack imagination, and are too expensive to maintain. indigo adds that the impact will not first show up as layoffs, but as quietly no longer hiring; companies expanding production will shift to spending more on tokens and compute budgets, while also believing that individuals and small teams able to define problems and command Agent workflows are entering a period of amplified leverage.
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The author relays Taleb's judgment on white-collar jobs being hit by AI, and adds the observation that incremental jobs will drop to zero.
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View original postThe problem isn’t that AI is intelligent. It isn’t. The problem is that too many adults (but not all) are at once mechanistic, imitative, unimaginative, stupid, formulaic, influenceable, & gullible, arrogant beyond their skill set, & too expensive to maintain.
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The problem isn’t that AI is intelligent. It isn’t. The problem is that too many adults (but not all) are at once mechanistic, imitative, unimaginative, stupid, formulaic, influenceable, & gullible, arrogant beyond their skill set, & too expensive to maintain.
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Taleb has been firing off a series of posts on X these past few days: Wake up! Every occupation called "white-collar," that "middle-class dream," is going to be hit hard by AI, much faster than expected, and with terrifying social consequences. Every job invented in the 20th century is now under threat from AI.
Some defend it by saying: "New technologies have always created new jobs." Maybe! We'll see, but what we're talking about right now are the old jobs.
The problem isn't that AI is smart—it isn't smart. The problem is that too many adults (though not all) are a combination of mechanical, herd-following, unimaginative, stupid, formulaic, easily manipulated, and credulously obedient, with arrogance far exceeding their own abilities, and too expensive to keep.
When a person spends every day just mechanically shuttling between emails, spreadsheets, and processes, he is destined to lose to an Agent that never tires and costs a few cents per call. The impact won't first show up as dramatic layoffs, but as a quiet "no longer hiring." Existing positions are protected by legal and organizational inertia, but incremental positions go straight to zero; companies expanding production no longer rely on adding headcount, but on adding token and compute budgets.
But looked at another way, this is precisely the greatest dividend period for individuals and agile small teams. As those mechanical, herd-following, by-the-book job types are cleared out, people who can define problems, have taste, and know how to command Agent workflows now, for the first time, have a weapon to amplify personal leverage tenfold or a hundredfold.
The 20th-century "middle-class wage-earning dream" really is about to wake up; but the era belonging to super-individuals and Agentic Business has only just begun.