markjgsmith

Peak plumber

I thought Jason Calacanis made an interesting point on his podcast this week [1:03:40]:

"If you could do a search and figure out what’s wrong with your dish washer [...] and not have to call the plumber, you’re like this is an incredible experience. You know what, people haven’t had that experience yet. But this winter when people’s HVACS go off or their pipes freeze and they take a picture of it, or they do a search on Google and it says oh you have this HVAC unit, it’s known to do this, here is how you reset it and relight the pilot, and you don’t have to call the person, and you fix it, or your housekeeper was able to clear the dishwasher cause suddenly they know how to take a picture of it and put the model number and say Error 72, and it’s like Error 72 is something is blocking it, take out this thing and clear the blockage. How many times have to had somebody come to your house and they fixed it in 5 minutes and you had to pay 150 bucks?"

The word on the street these days, is that the best new career path for everyone is to become a plumber or an electrician. Every Hollywood celebrity is parroting this new wisdom. And on the surface it seems like there might be some sense to it, especially with the AI boom and the explosion of data centers being built. Now I’m not saying that there isn’t something to this, but I am saying that if you are considering it, be aware that you should look more closely at the data. There are lots of competing factors.

While there is a data centre boom going on, and they do need lots of tradespeople in that industry, that’s a very specific type of electrician, and likely by the time you finish your apprenticeship, the boom will have plateaued quite a bit. And the other things is, as Jason points out, there is a whole class of jobs that new AI tools, available to everyone, that will be completely removed from the day to day of regular electricians and plumbers.

All this to say that, it’s worth doing your own analysis of the situation, because IMO there are a lot of self serving opinions being casually thrown about at the minute. They aren’t necessarily untrue, but they aren’t necessarily true either.

BTW, there are some interesting and quite spicy opinions about OpenAI in this episode too, especially if you are a developer using or thinking of using their API. Worth a listen. #

Platform generated AI slop at scale

There is an interesting piece on the latest Vergecast episode [34:15] with David Pierce and Nilay Patel about the immanent death of the creator economy. There is lots of good discussion, but the real catch is a quote they pulled from a recent Meta earnings call in which Mark Zuckerberg recently announced that we are entering the 3rd era of social media.

According to Zuck the 1st era was all about sharing content generated by family and friends, the second era was when they added the creator content, and the third era is AI generated content that will be added "ontop" of the first two kinds. It sure is an interesting choice of words.

Nilay has this to say about it:

"There is only so many people in the world Mark. And they only have so much time in the day. Supply and demand dictates that if you add much more content to the feeds, the attention will be taken from something else. I know where the attention will be taken from, cause you are not paying friends, family and the elementary school parents group, you are paying the creators. You are going to take the money away from the creators with your universe, your corpus of AI content."

It’s one of those extremely obvious points that is worth saying out loud, especially because the creator economy hasn’t exactly been having the best of times recently. But Meta aren’t the only ones. OpenAI is heading in this direction at a shocking pace, they have gone from non-profit, to possibly the biggest profit maximizers in all of human existence, entering into any market that has even a hint of action.

Platforms competing with their users isn’t exactly a new thing, it’s unfortunately a re-occurring theme in tech. It seems we are about to enter into another era of the platforms eating their users. #