Taleb: AI will destroy all performative skills, from chess to math olympiads
akbirthko · x · 2026-10-12
- Nassim Taleb generalizes from Kasparov and the math-competition debacle: as a rule, all performative skills will be destroyed by AI. A computer always outperforms humans in comparable feats, so competitive chess is no longer a skill, and mathematical acrobatics is the same. What's left is what makes us human.
- Replying, akbirthko notes aristocracies are very human—we're hairless apes who adore status games, and pure-math culture speaks to that. In contrast, the Tripos, Gaokao, and JEE are closer to industrial pipelines producing math acrobats—exactly what LLMs actually replace.
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