The Tailor Who Taught Me What Algorithms Can't Measure
On finding the edges where human judgment still matters, and why the future belongs to those who can dance between craft and code.
The Encounter
I met the tailor on a Tuesday afternoon in a neighborhood that Google Maps had trouble finding.
His shop was narrow, lit by one window, and smelled like wool and linseed oil. There was no menu. No pricing page. No reviews.
He looked at me the way a librarian looks at someone who has never read a book.
What He Taught Me
The measuring tape moved with a quiet authority. Not the precision of a laser cutter—something else entirely.
The precision of understanding that every human body tells a different story, and that story cannot be compressed into a dataset.
“Computers can’t do this,” he said. Not with pride. With the same tone you’d use to say the sky is blue.
“The measurements are the easy part. The understanding—that’s where we remain irreplaceable.”
— The Tailor, Lisbon, January 2024
I sat with that for a long time.
The Edge We’re Looking For
This is the work that matters now. Not the work that can be automated, but the work that requires us to be uninterchangeably human.
The tailor knew something that most technologists miss: his craft was not about speed or scale. It was about the thing that happens when a human being pays close attention to another human being for long enough to understand them.
VERDICT: The algorithms will catch up to everything except this.
What This Means for the Rest of Us
If the tailor is right—and I think he is—then the future doesn’t belong to the people who can code the fastest or ship the most.
It belongs to the people who can still do the thing no machine has learned to replicate: pay genuine, unhurried attention.
That’s not a skill. It’s a practice. And it requires the one thing AI cannot manufacture.
Time.