A Bullshit Job For Every American

No One Is Safe #

If the AI-pilled among us are right, then Claude is coming for all of our jobs. You might think that, unlike those software engineers whose minds are only good for rotating shapes, you have the Completely Impossible To Be Automated Skill Of Relating To Humans. I think you’re wrong.^[1] In this post I assume that all valuable economic tasks, including Relating To Humans, will be done by AI in the next 2-50 years.

I have taken two ‘gap years’ in my life. I stayed busy: I worked on a ranch, walked the Camino de Santiago, got my yoga teacher certification, meditated silently for ten days straight, learned to freedive and mountaineer and climb and kitesurf. During both breaks, I planned to take a year off, and was mentally done after six months.

Having responsibilities is good for the soul. If AI creates infinite material abundance, we’ll get bored eventually and start looking for the purpose, structure, and responsibility that a job provides.^[2]

Pumping Gas #

Pumping your own gas is illegal in Brazil, South Africa, New Jersey, and much of Oregon.

The rhetoric around these laws is nuts. I encourage you to skim the old Oregon statute, because I chuckled while reading it, and the lawyers were chuckling while they wrote it:

“The dangers of crime and slick surfaces described in subsection (3) of this section are enhanced because Oregon’s weather is uniquely adverse, causing wet pavement and reduced visibility” (Oregon Statute, via Web Archive)

“The typical practice of charging significantly higher prices for full-service fuel dispensing in states where self-service is permitted at retail: Discriminates against customers with lower incomes, who are under greater economic pressure to subject themselves to the inconvenience and hazards of self-service;” (Oregon Statute, Web Archive)

These are not the real reasons we have self-serve gas station laws. They mostly began as naked protectionist rackets. In New Jersey, for example, there was a gas station cartel in the 1940s that fixed prices at 22 cents a gallon, someone opened up a self-serve station with a 3-cent discount, the cartel shot up his store, and when that didn’t work they got self-serve banned via testimony from the state fire marshal.^[3]

Said cartel no longer exists, but New Jersey’s law still does. I speculate that these laws are kept around primarily for the sake of employing the attendants. In America we say this part quietly if at all, because it smells like socialism. (It was reason 14 of 17 in the old Oregon law). In Brazil, where the law was championed by an explicitly Communist politician, employment is the primary justification.

Gas station attendant is a job people take seriously enough to protect via legislation, and to show up for every day. AFAICT the only thing it has going for it is that something bad happens if you don’t show up: people can’t pump gas. This is contrived, obviously, but that seems not to matter. The short-term consequences are real.

It’s fun to imagine comparably silly positions, if one was to make them up from first principles. The one I can’t get out of my head is a ‘Stoplight Jockey:’ you watch cars and manually turn the lights green at the appropriate times. You can put the system on ‘autopilot’ if you need to go to the bathroom or take a nap, and safeguards are built in to prevent you from, eg, turning all the lights green at once.

Given the choice between becoming a Stoplight Jockey and getting UBI, I’d prefer UBI. But I think we can do better.

Robbie’s List of Not-Bullshit Jobs #

The fundamental difficulty to remember is that: humans have to agree to let you do this job, even though AI will be much better at it. The first version of this list included therapist, but I don’t think that one will work: post-singularity AI is going to be so much better at therapy than any human.

Here are some jobs we will do, despite being worse than AI:^[4]

Athlete, broadly defined: We are already much slower than cars, but this has done nothing to diminish Olympic Track and Field. The whole point of sports is to appreciate human abilities. I suspect we’ll make up many new competitive pursuits. A lot of our ‘world championships’ are already silly, e.g. cheese rolling, wife carrying, toe wrestling, air-guitaring, rock-paper-scissors,^[5] darts,^[6] baseball.

Park rangers / outdoor guides: There is already a massive demand to become a ranger, vastly exceeding supply of jobs available. Call me an asshole, but: maintaining trails and monitoring wildlife are perfect because the people doing these tasks will take them very seriously, and the rest of the world will not care about imperfections.

Academic: Even if AI understands the universe better than any human, and can explain it better than any human, and does so faithfully every time, we’ll convince ourselves that it’s important for at least some humans to understand math/science/technology/psychology/etc. I’m told academia is toxic, but demand for these jobs still vastly exceeds supply.

Influencer: In 2000 you’d have been shocked to learn that people get paid six or seven figures to post videos about themself on the internet, but here we are. In the future we will find new ways to reward people for sharing good ideas and being popular.

Zookeeper / conservationist: Having a dog is great because you get to cuddle a cute creature, which releases happy hormones. But it’s also a form of make-work. You bring a creature into the world that depends on you for its physical and emotional needs, and then you meet said needs, and feel altruistic every day for doing so.^[7] In the future we’ll micromanage AI as it operates on injured wildlife, hold long hearings to decide which plants are native enough to keep around, and keep lots and lots of pets.

Artist, broadly defined: Many people take it as an axiom that AI cannot create ‘true art.’ This is a classic case of ‘No True Scotsman,’ and I will write up a blog post soon to prove it. The stubborn few that I can’t convince will keep some human artists employed post-singularity. More seriously: art can be done entirely for the artist’s benefit, so while this lacks the structure and responsibility that makes something a ‘job,’ people will certainly spend time on it.

Teacher: Being a role model for young humans, live in the flesh, can’t be automated almost by definition.^[8] AI will be the one explaining algebra.

Core Needs Become Status Symbols #

Clothing began entirely as a functional object. Today dramatically more effort goes into making clothing a more effective status symbol^[9] than goes into keeping humans warm.

Most vegetable gardens are for aesthetics or enjoyment. Meals are eaten by Instagram first. Exercise is for looking hot. Plastic surgery is growing faster than medicine generally.

Someday, jobs will exist almost exclusively to meet humans’ psychological needs rather than their economic ones.

You Should Read Brave New World #

It is an excellent intuition pump for this class of problems.

Credit to David Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs for coining the term, though that book was longer than it needed to be.