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The modern white-collar workplace has been understood by some as an exemplar of the "longhouse": an increasingly feminized environment where "alignment" and "consensus" matter more than "action" and "execution".
In the age of AI, I posit three phases in the evolution of the modern workplace, the labor market, and (as a result) society more broadly.
Phase 1: increased ossification and feminization. This will occur because the (mostly male) "doers" on which the company relies are likely the first to be automated. There may still need to be a handful of rockstar performers, but the age of AI will, at least initially, make all intellectual endeavors a winner-takes-all market. With the actual work mostly automated, the remaining management is free to spend even more time doing longhouse things.
Phase 2: the return of the laborer. There will be a simultaneous increase in blue-collar jobs (with a glut in software, demand will increase for physical/real-world goods) and an increase in blue-collar labor, occupied primarily by men. White-collar labor becomes increasingly rare. The layers of middle management are no longer required, and if capabilities continue on trend it won't be long before the only thing preventing some white-collar industries from full automation will be slow capability diffusion. In this step, society will become more masculine. It will appear that a "retvrn" to traditional gender roles is underway. Men will again perform the large share of labor.
Phase 3: automation. Robotics and automated factories to create the robots become a reality. Labor demand sharply declines. Depending on how society handles this transition it could be a time of broad prosperity and leisure, or it could be a time of strife and mass inequality. But either way, the longhouse will come back with a vengeance. In a society where labor and intellect are no longer required, the only thing that will matter is status games and relative positioning. This is a game that the feminine temperament is better suited for. The boot that stomps forever on our faces will be high-healed.
As a male in an intellectual role, none of these three phases will be kind to me.
There are two main AI scenarios; near-term extinction and near term non-extinction. The dice have been rolled on that, it is difficult at this point to predict which one will happen.
The extinction scenario is irrelevant in any cultural or economic context; discussion of it is meaningless unless you are counting on joining Yud in one final moment of ecstatic vindication before oblivion.
Within the ‘non extinction’ universe, then, it seems likely that in short order all of the activities we currently classify as labor (indeed pretty much all of the activities we do in general, though maybe that is less relevant) will shortly be done by AI or by cheap, mass produced robotics guided by AI.
There are a few reasons why, in this scenario, I do not anticipate a permanent state of mass unemployment (in either a negative Marshall Brain style or positive Elon Musk style - though there is minimal difference between them).
Many white collar jobs are already invented. This includes both millions of public and private sector jobs. Since the end of the Second World War and the development through the 20th century of manufacturing automation and the emergence of computing hundreds of millions of jobs have been artificially invented by a combination of regulation and direct and indirect government spending in sectors like education, healthcare, finance, law, actual public employment working for government and non-government (but funded directly and indirectly by it) and quasi-government organizations, old age care and more.
At the same time, the band of one’s working life has narrowed out of the average human lifespan - we start working full time much later (often in our mid twenties instead of mid teens) and retire at a similar age while living much longer. This and the above are quasi-deliberate state policy to maintain a broad level of employment, and the incentives for this will continue to be present.
Humans will always compete in games of status. Status involves reward. It seems extremely unlikely that tens of millions of high status people around the world - and the PMC is the demographic that largely invented and controls AI, in terms of background class - will accept a status on the level of an unemployed single mother in the trailer park living off Universal Basic Income. They will invent new games of status and ensure they are rewarded for them, and the best way to do that is beneath a veil of quasi-meritocracy, just as it is in our current system. There is nothing people with minor status fear more than having that petty status taken away from them or otherwise limited (see cops and customs officers). Most politicians and tech people aren’t generationally super rich, they’re from and of the upper middle class, and man mostly serves his class.
The incentives of mass UBI + full unemployment are extremely poor from a governing perspective. People respond to incentives. Currently, one of the main incentives that keeps gainfully employed people in line and law abiding is the risk of life ruining unemployment. Even for the semi-employed, a stint in prison can be life ruining precisely because of its effect on one’s employment prospects. In a wider sense, the fact that if you work hard, you can escape the squalor, dirtiness, and shabbiness of the underclass is the central incentive for working hard. If everyone gets ‘paid’ the same check at the end of the month, why not be disruptive in school? Why not commit minor petty crime regularly? Why not engage in endless antisocial behavior? If you work hard your whole life only for Commissar Elon to throw you into section 8 with the addicts and degenerates when your software engineering job gets automated by Grok, you are more likely to revolt than your new neighbors. The automated sentinel killer drone police fascism squads won’t appear or be sanctioned immediately; as we unfortunately just found out, democracy of a sort still exists in America, for better or worse.
The actual logistics of transitioning to UBI are economically painful and there is no easy way around it. What happens to debt? What happens to mortgages that UBI doesn’t cover, or indeed ones that it does? Who gets the nice apartments, the fancy hotel rooms? Do they all go out of business? What happens when consumer confidence and spending collapses? What happens during the panic? What happens when the financial system collapses in a huge credit crunch? The education system - especially colleges and vocational schools - immediately collapses because nobody thinks they can pay back loans and because education no longer leads to any opportunity. Universal unemployment plus UBI runs into many of the same problems as, say, suddenly transitioning to Full Communism, which has historically been economically fraught, except even more extensively damaging to economic activity.
The solution is obvious. We’re going to work invented jobs, brought into being by legislation that will be no less banal than New Jersey banning you from pumping your own gas. Every contract has to be reviewed by a human for at least one billable hour per x pages. Every bank loan has to be reviewed by at least one human for at least y time. Every line of code in commercial software has to be reviewed by a human for at least t seconds. Every company audit has to have one human auditor for z months for every $10m of revenue up to $100m and then every $100m thereafter - there, I just saved lawyers, retail bankers, software developers and accountants in four sentences. You can figure out the rest. If anyone seems to publish a huge piece of commercial software with a suspiciously small 2 man company the government just says “seems unlikely you guys reviewed all 3 million lines of code yourself” and levies a ruinous fine and bans your tool from sale or distribution, maybe even for free. Obviously all this is draft stuff, but you can increasingly close loopholes until essentially labor costs are forced onto all productive enterprise. When it comes to public sector employment, of course, you don’t even need that.
To smart people like those here, many of these will seem laughably fake because they are (although many of our jobs already are). But most will accept them quickly. In many ways, they will be no more fake than many of the jobs that already exist today!
Personally, I'll accept a fake job if and only if I can put in fake hours.
Right now, I think we should pivot to becoming artists, curators, athletes, piano players, researchers, etc. Status would be external popularity or internal achievement. Incentive would be that that you'll be shamed and bothered if you fall into a rut, at least unless you're an intrinsic stoner; maybe they are the people who don't respond to internal or external shame, so it works out. Transitioning to UBI would work by: people in the aforementioned "failed careers" initially manage a livable-but-basic lifestyle like starving artists, then gradually afford more luxuries, while rich people's incomes gradually revert to median by inflation, and/or the extras they can afford become more luxury and less essential (like decent healthcare or a safe neighborhood).
Furthermore, I think that's feasible.Who would object? And rich people who want to coerce the world into a worse dystopia must handle backstabbers, the AI becoming misaligned especially towards their children...I think it's easier.
But I say "right now" because I'm sure later there's a better solution. Ironically, finding it is another viable career, unlikely to be fully automated.
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