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Notes -
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.
Every man a project manager!
No, seriously - if AI trends continue, it might be good at writing memos, doing research, constructing arguments, finding citations, booking meetings, constructing presentations, drafting architectural plans, etc. If every office worker gets that capability at his fingertips, it (in theory) means that pretty much anyone who is decently literate and competent can then supervise loads of AIs doing loads of work - because AI ain't gonna prompt itself. Competition will keep the price down on AI, whereas if each man is suddenly 8x as productive he might be able to bring home a managerial salary.
I suspect things won't turn out quite this way (or at least not for a while) but hey it wouldn't be so bad an outcome.
I do think AI has made programmers more productive, and that it is about to make them much more productive to the point where they might be essentially project managers.
What remains to be seen is what economic benefit that will have. For example, if there are 10x as many video games as there were before, do they create 10x the economic value. Of course not.
As the economy becomes more digital, it becomes a lot harder to quantify gains in GDP. In 1987, Legend of Zelda might have cost $50. Today, for almost the same price, you can buy a Zelda game with far better graphics and a much longer story line. But does the consumer today get more enjoyment from 2025 Zelda that from 1985 Zelda? I don't think so. The hedonic treadmill is real.
Similarly, does the economy grow from making TikTok 20% more addictive. Does it grow from adding AI-generated thots to Instagram? Or from making AI girlfriends? A lot of the stuff that happens in software, maybe even most of it, is just not that important or even counterproductive.
Somewhat related...
The dream of reducing drudgery by offloading it to AI might fall flat too. AI will make it possible for a human lawyer to easily glean information from a 1000 page document. But it will also make it possible for that same human lawyer to produce a 100,000 page contract of dense legalese. Existing improvements in technology have seemingly only increased the demand for lawyers.
I can’t imagine that with the current pace of development at cheap conversational LLMs, soon we won’t start seeing RPGs that are truly open world with actually intelligent NPCs or strategy games where the AI controlled opponents are truly strategising and conspiring etc.
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