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Are we all going to work fake jobs?
Thoughts on Semi Automated Luxury Earth Social Democracy
I
Imagine you are appointed the colonial governor of a faraway land. Your own country has a small population but is technologically advanced and largely automated. The land you are taking over has a vast population but little development. The natives neither love nor hate you, they are ambivalent. At trivial cost, you establish a largely automated domestic economy using your advanced technology; food production, infrastructure, consumer goods, all are now produced and distributed locally at negligible marginal cost, by machine. The native cut (determined by your own democracy’s moral value system, which has also determined that you have a duty to look after the locals and facilitate to some extent their self actualization) of some colonial extractive resource mining easily covers the imports required. Self driving cars are maintained by automated workshops, houses are built in prefab factories and assembled by humanoid drones maintained in automated warehouses, that kind of thing.
You find yourself faced, now, with the choice of how to distribute the food, water, houses, clothes, electronic goods and so on that your society produces. Complete abundance is, after all, impossible even with advanced automation; you are still constrained by space, electricity, material resources. Some inequality is probably inevitable, too, even if it can be reduced; someone is going to live in the house with the nice view, although you could probably turn it into a ‘people’s timeshare’ where every family gets a day every ten years, or something like that. And a ‘basic income’ is feasible. You can hand out resource credits or dollars and give everyone the same amount, a socialism without labor.
But do you want to?
II
A central reason for capitalism’s success is its relatively positive alignment of incentives (phrased in a variety of ways). The provision of useful and in-demand goods and services begets the provider status and resources, which alongside a robust market economy drives innovation blah blah blah. The point is that, generally speaking, a large amount of prosocial behavior is implicitly incentivized by a capitalist system. You want money for a vacation, or your kids’ college, or to retire, so you want a good job, so you work hard, so you pay attention in class, so you don’t assault a police officer or commit a crime that will go on your record.
None of these are perfect, but broadly they work. It’s why “bail reform” (eliminating cash bail), so beloved of the left, quickly became a disaster: it turns out that the ability to raise a few thousand dollars at short notice is strongly predictive of someone who is less likely to commit crimes while on bail.
III
Those of us who regularly travel the far reaches of the third world will be familiar with the distinct form of overstaffing common everywhere from Belize to Bali. You will walk into, for example, a convenience store, a bodega, in Thailand and there will be 7 people working there. African restaurants are perhaps the most iconic example, a few customers a day and yet twenty members of staff, some uniformed.
It’s tempting to see this through the lens of that Dalrymple narration, but it’s not purely an east- (or south-) of-Hajnal-line thing. The Philippine store owner runs a profitable business (grocery margins are much higher in the third world, for a variety of reasons) and that has an extraordinary, universal tendency to result in expanding employment, regardless of necessity. The same thing is true in America, just replace 7/11 with Google. Google increased headcount by 20x during a period in which its core product responsible for almost all profitability remained search ads. Most of the new hires were not working on search. The company grew because it made more money, more than because ‘it’ wanted to do more things. Managers built up their fiefs. The point is that job creation has always been divorced from economic efficiency, even without state incentives.
IV
If you read about how white collar work was conducted before modern computers, the extraordinary amount of paperwork, the millions of clerks and secretaries, the vacuum systems to move papers around a building, the memos and the people who circulated them, the manual research that took so many hours to do what takes seconds today seems extraordinary. Then consider how many more women are in the labor market than shortly after the baby boom. Consider the relative decline in manufacturing employment. Consider that many of the sectors with the largest growth in employment have been precisely those - like law and finance and insurance and healthcare administration - that have seen previously unbelievable efficiency gains because of even basic software like spreadsheets and databases and email. Think about the internet, which people correctly predicted in the 1990s would destroy huge numbers of jobs, reduce opportunities for arbitrage, kill large sectors funded by paper advertising, etc. It did all of those things and yet employment remained steady.
Economists will tell you that technological unemployment always creates new jobs. Productivity rises, goods become cheaper, people can buy more, demand creates larger markets, drives demand, drives new employment. I think they are right about the consequence but wrong, as of late, about the process.
V
I have a conspiracy theory, one shared in part by the late David Graeber. Starting in the late 1970s, rich world governments - often without anyone even really explicitly acknowledging what is going on - began deliberately creating tens of millions of private and public sector jobs, both directly through specific lending and indirectly through regulation and other government activity. This, in combination with the inevitable tendency of profitable private enterprise to overemploy, and a certain residual aversion to leisure in some cultures, has preserved, arguably unnaturally, full employment.
Lower birth rates mean a greater proportion of the public are old and not working. Mass college attendance means many people start working at full time at 21 or 22, rather than 16 or 17. College loans and regulations, including title ix created reams of bullshit jobs in the universities. Social security, medicare, medicaid, endless charity donations by the state and the rich, homeless outreach, awareness, infinity startups funded by ZIRP money, regulations that have tripled compliance, KYC and regulatory employment in finance since 2009, environmental legislation that mandates hiring people to write reports and fill forms, to sign off on emissions statements. The legal, consulting, accounting and professional services sectors where a combination of circular outsourcing and demand created by regulation have seen employment skyrocket despite tasks that took an accountant in 1960 days taking minutes now.
There is often a supply of jobs when the demand is in many cases employment rather than its product.
VI
Was this wrong?
I remember realizing as a child that pretty much everyone who worked at the DMV (at least in New York) was an overweight black woman. Some would say the DMV itself is a jobs creation program for these women, many of whom support children. Is this a bad thing? It may be better that someone works than that they don’t, even if that employment is unnecessary, maybe even if it is mildly inconvenient. If anything, one of the central achievements of Protestant modernity was a work ethic that saw labor not necessarily as an end but as a means of accomplishing more than just production.
There are three categories of medium-term AGI scenario:
Extinction (whether fully autonomously or at human direction; “fifty rich guys starve everyone else” also falls into this category btw)
Abundance (of the heaven on earth, all material limits quickly fall away, it’ll happen faster than you possibly expect) AGI 2027 school, each of us can have our own solar system, The Culture, whatever
A system in which scarce resources and goods continue to be divided among humans even though non-negligible amounts of human labor is no longer materially necessary for the production of goods and most services, and in which prosocial behavior continues to have a substantial impact on society’s wider quality of life.
The first two scenarios are mostly uninteresting in their grand scale and absolute finality. The third is in my opinion more likely, but definitely more interesting. Mass unemployment is destabilizing, which is bad for owners of capital. Muahahaha evil aside, the rich lack the coordination to somehow blanket eliminate the poor and abolish democracy at exactly the moment the robots take everyone’s job, these things aren’t so neat, not to mention much of their own net worth would be caught up in a near total economic and debt crisis caused by falling demand and mass deflation.
It makes sense, in this scenario, to pursue a more aggressive version of the program that has been ongoing now for many decades. To manufacture employment. To have people do, perhaps ever more overtly, ever more ridiculously, what everyone knows is unnecessary. New Jersey has banned pumping your own gas since 1929. You can ban self-driving cars. You can require that companies of x revenue employ y human auditors for z hours, that a human radiologist has to review each x ray for y minutes before it’s allowed to inform any medical decision or be handed over to a patient. This is just the overt stuff. You can pay millions of people to be the even less useful AI-monitoring equivalents of night time security guards at a non-target; once in a hundred of their lifetimes, something unusual might happen. The rest of the time they get played to sit and play Switch. And that still might be better, and smarter than not doing it.
If the only line you can’t cross is something that sends you to jail, will you behave the same? Will most people? The threat of a lost job, of lost opportunity, the reward of a financially successful life, all these things drive a lot of prosocial behavior. It may be better to simulate them than to do without them entirely.
Great post!
If we're indeed getting to somewhere between "Semi Automated Luxury Earth Social Democracy" and "Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism" (I'm not convinced - we've build an exceedingly complex civilization and AI can't save us), I think your central premise is correct: a job gives people purpose/structure/incentives. You want/need all of that for a more stable society.
The interesting question is if those jobs need to be so obviously unnecessary.
If you run a jobs program, why not do something good? Take small groups of children on a well-designed adventure. Teach them music, art or crafts. Coach them in a sport. Give them a lot of time one-on-one if you have so much capacity. Hell, take a group of adults through the same program - less formative, but it probably makes them happy/health/social if it's well-done (no excuse why it wouldn't be, you can pay people to do planning and quality control, then staple more incentives to the quality). And most of them don't have anything better to do anyway.
There's the argument that the post-WW2 combination of cheap housing and the expansion of the welfare state in Great Britain (together with the growth of new art schools and direct public funding for culture) resulted in a extraordinary wave of music, art, and cultural experimentation, completely over-proportional to the relative size of British society. And if you look at the artist at the fore-front, much of them came from working‑class or lower‑middle‑class backgrounds.
We could just do that again, so the people uninterested in adult day care can occupy themselves with something productive of their own inspiration. Most likely some of them will greatly contribute to the shared culture.
I think this may be one of those "exponential curves are self-similar" things: if you pulled up an administrator for Hammurabi and described the state of modern farming, I'm sure they'd look at you agog and ask what you do with the idle subsistence farmers. And the story there is that "division of labor" led to a centuries-long Renaissance in terms of pretty much every human endeavor that isn't "scratch out a living on a small plot by hand". For all the claims of "singularity", indefinite exponential growth seems an equally valid outcome.
So I guess I'm on team "we're pretty good at finding new ways to keep ourselves busy", with a look of part dismay at "consoom content slop" trends (as if alcoholism and other vices haven't been with us for ages too).
Part of it is just how you look at the economics: you can exchange money for goods or services, but when you buy goods that money isn't expended in the production and distribution of that good, and it at the end of the day it ends up in the accounts of one or more actual humans. Automation can reduce the number of humans in that chain, but the prospect of eliminating it completely seems pretty far off: "my car, fashioned from steel mined from land I own by my own robot army, fueled by gas my robots extracted and refined".
I agree there are reasonable concerns about the concentration of capital, but the free-market endpoint of "Scrooge McDuck holds all the dollars" is a self-defeating liquidity crisis where nobody can exchange goods or services (even spending from the gold pile ends the condition), and other than inflationary threats, the market is typically ambivalent about a huge hoard of unmoving currency. "Bertrand Russell's teapot, but it's a quadrillion US dollar bills that I own" is at best a way to start a religion, unless the astroid mining folks strike it rich, but even then it'd only directly hit goldbugs unless they have actual US dollars, which are a social construct.
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