Hairdressing is the most AI-proof industry. 

We were talking at lunch the other day about having to go get our hair cut and, as it always does nowadays, our conversation turned to evaluating the impact of AI on our topic of discussion, which today happened to be our best and worst experiences at barbershops.

After joking about different ways of doing this, each one more horrendous than the other, we concluded that hairdressing might just be one of, if not the most AI-proof industry, because it is an inherently human service. 

Unlike, for example, plumbing, which will likely be safe for a while still due to the technical challenge of automating it, but will be automated the moment robots are capable enough to do it, hairdressing presents a technical challenge of potentially similar difficulty, while also dealing with the human elements of trust, taste and connection:

  1. Despite leaps of advances in surgical and medical robots, cutting hair is an incredibly difficult task to automate in terms of its physics and the variety of different types of hair and styles.

  2. People are nowhere near comfortable about voluntarily trusting autonomous robots with scissors near their heads on a daily basis yet.

  3. The quality and fittingness of hairstyles are so dependent on various characteristics of the individual that taste and finesse play a massive role in the quality of the service. 

  4. Haircuts are often gotten in order to appear attractive to other people and thus another aligned human is always, by definition, a much better judge of style than any AI. 

  5. A hairdresser has a massive amount of responsibility, which they must be accountable for, as a bad haircut can ruin the life of the client for the next couple of months. People want somebody they can blame. Barbershops are likely to stay diverse by how quickly people switch after bad experiences. 

  6. Many people trust and enjoy opening up to or otherwise catching up with their barbers and hairdressers, and thus, positively anticipate that interaction. 

  7. Barbershops and hairdressers are one of the few remaining active third places, where people can spontaneously meet each other and where a certain community of regulars can form.

  8. Many of the people who have already found good hairdressers are unlikely to ever change as long as they operate due to the trust and rapport built over the years.

  9. Developing, building and maintaining robots capable of replacing such delicate human labor is very expensive and difficult.

  10. Though chains exist, many barbershops are still largely independently run small businesses that are likely to be neither capable nor willing to make massive investments into directly replacing themselves.

Of course, some brave and particularly busy individuals with many bad experiences at barbershops would eventually try a fully automated service too and perhaps even find its efficiency for simple cuts great, but on the aggregate, good hairdressers will always have demand.