AI keeps getting more capable. At some point, likely in the next 1-3 years unless we do something to stop it, we get to where AI systems are able to do everything almost anyone can do. This is often described as leading to a world with “no jobs”, but I think this tends to confuse more than help.
One sense in which there might be no jobs is that there might be no people. This is a very real concern, [1] and is the primary reason I think we need to slow down or pause AI development, but isn’t what I’m trying to talk about here.
Instead, when people say “no jobs”, they’re usually talking about a future where there are still people but humans are basically never the best way to go from “I have money” to “my problem is solved”. The history of automation has had many rounds of taking some kinds of problem and moving it to machines or human-directed machines: almost all ketchup bottles are filled by machines, almost all dirt is moved by human-controlled machines. As long as there were other things that needed doing which humans could do better than machines, though, humans have moved into other lines of work, and the futures envisioned by a 1930 Keynes in Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren haven’t come about. But this is changing fast, as the list of things we can do better than machines rapidly shrinks.
Words like “no jobs” or “economically obsolete” don’t really apply in these futures, though, since I do still expect people to pay others to do things. When you go to a concert and close your eyes listening to a fantastic performance, there’s a sense in which the performer is obsolete: the PA system could be (and sometimes is) putting out a recording instead of music live in the moment. But we care that there is a person up there entertaining us. People buy handmade things (or are tricked into thinking they are), and enjoy receiving services from people.
So I’d like some better terms for this potential world in which nothing humans do feeds into whether anyone is fed, has shelter, gets medical care, or has any other basic need met, but where people still do things for each other, sometimes for pay, because of a preference that some portions be done by a human. Thoughts? I asked Opus 5.5, and its favorite phrasing was (sigh) “non-load-bearing”.
[1] The people
building the models do not know how to reliably control them or how
much we should trust them. As much as there is a plan, it’s to almost
entirely delegate resolving this problem to these same models we don’t
know how to control and don’t know how much to trust. Here’s Kelsey
Piper writing after a visit
to Anthropic:
The public is hotly debating whether AI is a normal technology — something that will transform our world like the internet did — or more like the arrival of postindustrial modernity to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in the 1950s: something that vaporized a culture overnight. The third option is that AI is more like the rise of humanity as seen from the perspective of livestock animals. (In this scenario, AIs are the humans, and we are the animals whose fate will make no sense to us.)Anthropic believes that the second possibility is already baked in, and it’s hoping to prevent the third — but its plan for preventing that looks more like hope and guesswork than something we should trust it with.
Retirement.
This is our existing positive frame for not needing to work but getting to do fun stuff.
But feeling a bit useless and obsolete.
Possibly relevant words, none quite what you want:
Post-scarcity
Vestigial
Aristocratic
Prestige-driven
Relational
Traditional
Artisanal
Communitarian
Some links describing this exact scenario: Restrepo’s paper, djbinder’s post, my post. I don’t know the best phrase, but it feels like it shouldn’t use absolute terms like “obsolescence”, because the problem at root is relative: price of labor falling faster than price of goods required for survival. So maybe Dan Parshall’s “below rice wages”?
Zero Marginal Product (a Tyler Cowenism)
I think that’s wrong, since someone who makes a handmade thing someone else values enough to pay for has a positive marginal product.
But @djbinder argues persuasively that this mostly doesn’t work, unlike people like Alex Imas that argue that relational jobs will support most humans without UBI being the ~whole income stream, so zero marginal product is still mostly correct.
For the remainder, aristocratic/prestige-driven/status-driven words all work well here.