Is it realistic to keep people working jobs that don’t get anything done in the long term? I know most people will say that’s already happening, but imagine a society where basically every job is just a bullshit job made to keep you occupied, do you think people will continue working in a society like that?
Like you foresaw, I'll say this is the reality for most people. I think that just like now, those who want to do meaningful work will seek opportunities to do so.
If we had something like a Maslow’s hierarchy of needs but for work, I think meaningfulness would be the top of the pyramid. For most people in the world, not going hungry or affording housing are reasons enough to do work. Getting to do work you find meaningful is truly a privilege.
Yes, it's realistic. We're at least a couple of generations into this experiment now. Millions of people travel to and from an office to sit on a chair, doing nothing, all day, every day. This in turns keeps a whole bunch of people employed servicing their cars, preparing their food, sweeping the floor behind them etc.
None of these people question whether their jobs are really necessary for the few things we really need: food, shelter, warmth, health etc.
A couple of generations ago most women were employed in the least bullshit job of all: running a household. But now they're all wage slaves too. So yeah, it does work.
I asked Gemini to list the 10 most popular holiday destinations in the US, and the 10 places with the highest crime. There's only 1 place in the intersection: New Orleans.
Highest violent crime rates:
Memphis, Tennessee: ~2,400–2,500 per 100k
St. Louis, Missouri: ~2,000–2,100 per 100k
Detroit, Michigan: ~1,700–2,000 per 100k
Little Rock, Arkansas: ~1,600–1,800 per 100k
Baltimore, Maryland: ~1,600–1,700 per 100k
Oakland, California: ~1,400–1,900 per 100k
New Orleans, Louisiana: ~1,600–1,700 per 100k
Birmingham, Alabama: ~1,600–1,700 per 100k
Milwaukee, Wisconsin: ~1,100–1,600 per 100k
Cleveland, Ohio: ~1,500–1,600 per 100k
Most popular holiday destinations:
New York City, New York
Orlando, Florida
Las Vegas, Nevada
Maui, Hawaii
Grand Canyon National Park, Arizona
San Francisco, California
Miami, Florida
Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming
New Orleans, Louisiana
Great Smoky Mountains National Park, North Carolina/Tennessee
That's a terrible metric, because people going on a vacation probably aren't going there purposefully to commit crimes. What you want to do is look for increases in crime in a given place during holidays
Is that alone really a better metric? At least in Europe a lot of people travel during holidays, so there's less risk breaking into city flats because they're empty.
The steam engine replaced a lot of jobs. Tractors replaced a lot of jobs. Calculators replaced a lot of jobs. Computer used to be a job description before it was a personal device. There will be new jobs.
And for those who don't get to find a job, there'll be a convenient WWIII to utilize themselves, just like there was WWI after the steam engine replaced a lot of jobs and WWII after tractors replaced even more.
It won't happen overnight. Social change is constrained by integration speed. The average enterprise has many tasks that could be automated by models for several years already, yet they remain stubbornly unautomated. The reasons are primarily social:
• Lots of people aren't aware of what the models can do.
• They also aren't paying attention, and getting their attention is hard.
• Their impression of AI was formed by cheap low quality AI like free ChatGPT as of two years ago, Google AI overviews or Microsoft Copilot. So they think it sucks.
• A LOT of executives got burned by early pilots that overpromised then failed. Enterprise IT is a wasteland of dead AI pilots.
• Their IT systems are difficult to connect to models because they lack proper APIs or auth systems. Note the huge emphasis on fast computer use in the Astra announcement. A lot of work can only be done by clicking things.
• Executives don't want to let employees go, but aren't sure they can find new work for them either.
The last point is worth dwelling on. HN is full of socialists who imagine corporate executives as cigar smoking top hat wearers who chuckle all the way to the bank. The reality is more mundane: most executives don't want to lay people off and will fight hard to avoid doing so.
The average person in a position to make an AI project work either isn't incentivized with stock - this is often the case outside the US even for quite high ranking execs - or they are but don't believe laying people off will raise the share price enough to be worth the pain.
Also, executives often measure their success and self-worth by how many people report to them. Laying off half their department, even if it gets them a monetary bonus, would lead directly to a loss of social status as they can no longer say they manage 1,000 people but only 200, which matters if their social circle are all managers too (and for their wives, girlfriends, etc).
Layoffs suck and people HATE doing them, which is why companies often resort to forced percentage based layoffs to get managers to do it. If the incentives aren't there, the average executive will just sit on obvious AI deployment opportunities and/or deliberately sabotage them because getting rid of people is just all downside for them with no upside.
So institutions have enormous inertia. Model capabilities will run far ahead of what is actually used in reality, and this will continue for decades. It does mean that startups have a better chance than ever of outcompeting much larger incumbents though, as not hiring is far easier than firing.
Also: let's be honest. "I wrote a little app in a few weekends" -- "I built this in a few weeks", "this took me a month instead of a year"
These are productivity increases, sure, but still are $2000, $8000, $14000 of labor.
And doesn't count continued increase build time, more features, maintenance. The $20/mo SaaS isn't going away, and work can't pay you to endlessly tinker on fun internal projects and save $1200 of subscriptions for your $120k/yr salary.
It's fun, but SaaS is going to shift to more feature rich and we're going to see a ton of smaller projects that were pains to get started that can now work in a short amount of time.
Companies are going to get a huge surge of random internal projects and have to debate whether all the upkeep is valid for the pet projects, or if it's people fucking around at an untold scale.
Great point and writing. We have real world data point now which is waymo and how many drivers are still driving taxi in USA. All others are 10-100x time more complex than this, it takes literally decades
I’m all for an UBI but a future where people have no purposeful jobs, no way to actually make a real difference to anything around them, is a bleak one.
I would love such a future. I would be perfectly content focusing on my hobbies and playing video games rest of my life. Perhaps the UBI would be sufficient even for a little bit of travel.
Even if in the unlikely case UBI gets implemented, there is no way payment will be equal. Why would the rich give up their positions of power? They’ll just get more security and bribe politicians, enough to build private armies and fortresses so the poor and starving can’t touch them, and have no choice but to live out their lives in squalor…we’re seemingly headed that way according to many even without pervasive autonomous machines taking away all work.
> The billionaires considered using special combination locks on the food supply that only they knew. Or making guards wear disciplinary collars of some kind in return for their survival. Or maybe building robots to serve as guards and workers – if that technology could be developed “in time”.
Ah yes because these AI companies are just gonna give away the models for free that I use with my free computer and free smartphone while I eat with my free food in my free apartment.
Post-work society is an inevitability if we don't destroy our planet.