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What would be a good outcome for the automation of knowledge work?
Everyone’s been talking a lot about both the downsizing of the federal government, and the rapid improvement of LLM technology, such that the fake jobs are being cut at the same instant that more jobs are becoming to some degree fake. I don’t necessarily think that the US government should be a bastion of fake jobs, especially Culture War ones, but at the same time I wonder if there’s any end game people like Musk are working toward.
As far as I can tell:
Blue collar jobs are still largely intact. There’s about the same need as there ever was for tradesmen, handymen, construction workers, waste disposal, and so on. Most of the automation in those fields came from vehicles a century ago, and there doesn’t seem to be much of a push to leverage things like prefab construction all that much more. I personally like the new “3-D printed” extrusion style of architecture, but it doesn’t look like it actually saves all that much labor.
Pink collar: Childcare takes about the same amount of labor per child, but there are fewer children. Nursing is in demand, but surely healthcare can only take up so much of the economy. Surely? Retail continues to move online, and we continue to descend into slouchy sweatpants, parachute pants, and the oversized, androgynous look. I would personally like it if some of the excess labor went into actually fitted clothing, but haven’t seen any signs of this. Cleaning services seem to have more demand than supply, with an equilibrium of fewer things getting cleaned regularly than in the past, while continuing to be low in pay and prestige, so I’m anticipating more dirt, but little investment into fixing it.
Demand for performance based work seems to be going down. It’s just as good to listen to or watch a recording of the best person in a field than a live performance by someone less skilled. But were performers ever a large part of the economy?
Middle class office work, knowledge work, words, paperwork, emails: seems about to implode? How much of the economy is this? Google suggests about 12%. That seems like a lot, but nothing close to the 90% of farm work that was automated throughout the 21st Century. This article was interesting, about the role of jobs like secretary, typist, and admin assistant in the 20th Century. I tried working as an assistant to an admin assistant a decade or so ago, and was physically filing paperwork, which even then was pretty outdated.
The larger problem seems to be status. What kinds of work should the middle class do, if not clerk and word adjacent things? There seems to be near infinite demand for service sorts of work – can we have an economy where the machines and a few others do all the civilizationally load bearing work, while everyone else walks each other’s dogs and picks up each other’s food? My father thinks that there’s less slack in many of these jobs than when he was younger. I’m not sure if that’s true in general, or how to test it.
I don’t necessarily have a problem with a future where most people are doing and buying service work. The current trend of women all raising each other’s children and caring for each other’s elderly parents seems to not be working out very well, though.
The only real solution I'm aware of is some form of Universal Basic Income. In other words, if the economy explodes as human cognitive and physical labor is automated, then governments tax it and redistribute it.
This will likely prove unpopular with the people and entities being taxed on their newfound wealth, and it remains to be seen whether governments/democracies will listen to their anxious and unemployed populace over entrenched interests who now hold most of the money and power.
I don't think the likelihood of this happening is high enough for me to relax and take it for granted.
Even if UBI was a thing, that doesn't necessarily mean that inequality wouldn't be. The future uber-wealthy might well be the descendants of those who already had existing wealth, or at least shares in FAANG. I'd take this as acceptable if it meant I wouldn't starve to death.
Blue-collar work won't be safe for long either. We're seeing robotics finally take flight, there are commercial robo-taxis on the road, and cheap robo-dogs and even humanoids on the market. The software smarts are improving rapidly, and so is the hardware. Humans are going to end up squeezed every which way.
There are no reassuring answers or easy solutions, but at least hope isn't lost that we'll come out of this unemployed yet rich beyond our wildest dreams. It only takes a trivial share of the light cone to make billionaires of us all, assuming the current ones will deign to share.
UBI would be a new inflationary pressure, as it directly increases the money supply. Our Federal Reserve would need to to interpret that as another tool along with interest rates - if they were to employ it effectively.
(I'm not sure how things work across the pond.)
Government A: takes in $1B in taxes and distributes it out in UBI.
Government B: takes in $1B in taxes and distributes it out in welfare.
What is the difference between these two in terms of inflationary pressures?
(If you consistently print money to be able to give out more money than you take in you'll likely get inflation, of course.)
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