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blockspace babe. cultural attaché from ‘06 twitter. adjacent possible fanatic. writing at https://paragraph.xyz/@jdl

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you dont need to read "bullshit jobs" the book, but here is the original essay (also by graeber) that kicked it off:

https://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/

An idea / hypothesis I have:

The jobs that are going to be most decimated by this current (and the next few subsequent) forms of AI imo is the jobs that Graeber's talks about in "Bullshit Jobs"

Here's the original essay that spawned the idea of the book:

An idea / hypothesis I have:

The jobs that are going to be most decimated by this current (and the next few subsequent) forms of AI imo is the jobs that Graeber's talks about in "Bullshit Jobs"

Here's the original essay that spawned the idea of the book:

https://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/

creating and destroying; built flying cars & autonomous vehicles, now building roc.camera, writings: july.rocks

"So what are these new jobs, precisely? A recent report comparing employment in the US between 1910 and 2000 gives us a clear picture (and I note, one pretty much exactly echoed in the UK). Over the course of the last century, the number of workers employed as domestic servants, in industry, and in the farm sector has collapsed dramatically. At the same time, ‘professional, managerial, clerical, sales, and service workers’ tripled, growing ‘from one-quarter to three-quarters of total employment.’ In other words, productive jobs have, just as predicted, been largely automated away (even if you count industrial workers globally, including the toiling masses in India and China, such workers are still not nearly so large a percentage of the world population as they used to be.)"

From the essay in 2013:

"...jobs have had to be created that are, effectively, pointless. Huge swathes of people, in Europe and North America in particular, spend their entire working lives performing tasks they secretly believe do not really need to be performed. The moral and spiritual damage that comes from this situation is profound. It is a scar across our collective soul. Yet virtually no one talks about it."

Steward @ensdao, Working on @wannabet and jellybeans.wtf

It’s an interesting possibility and totally possible. I think it won’t be the same kind of current knowledge work middle manager, but I think there will definitely be something that is downstream consequence of all this AI slop that gets generated

My hot take is just the opposite. There will be even more bullshit jobs that exist because average productivity makes it okay to have so many people doing effectively nothing but getting paid for it

I think it’s less about a specific class of workers but a certain kind of soul crushing knowledge work middle class managers in corporate systems

I think what will likely happen is lot of jobs will get eliminated under the guise of it being bullshit but the hit rate would be 50:50 at best. Byrne had a great piece about how Graeber's research for bullshit jobs was just people emailing him and saying they hate their job

witness gonzo | writing at summerlightning.substack.com
| sachinbenny.xyz 

I think what will likely happen is lot of jobs will get eliminated under the guise of it being bullshit but the hit rate would be 50:50 at best. Byrne had a great piece about how Graeber's research for bullshit jobs was just people emailing him and saying they hate their job https://www.thediff.co/archive/bullshit-jobs-is-a-terrible-curiosity-killing-concept/

Aviator, diver, Etherean, nexialist, PhD in aviation ∩ climate science | Host of /diving /ethfinance /eth-staker /geopolitics /science /singapore /thomas

You put it eloquently! I appreciated your thread greatly

Damn, I only see this excellent thread now, just after posting mine on academic attainment in the AI age. I would have gladly referenced it because they complement each other nicely

i think bullshit jobs will continue for as long as we keep requiring people to work to live. they will just take new forms. we have more than enough resources for everyone, so to keep people working we have to invent more bullshit to do and to consume

A fun question to ask is out of the places where there are BS jobs (assuming you prescribe to the idea), how long will it take the companies to make the transition? If most BS jobs live in slow moving legacy businesses, how long is the transition period?

Tangentially related but, I was reading a post a while ago that put forward the idea that part of the reason that we have so many giant, over bloated organizations that could effectively be done with 12-100 people instead of thousands is because of social status games. The more people that you have working under you, the more that you manage, the higher your social status. Bullshit jobs may, in part, be a consequence of our biopsychology

Tidbit: the draft working title of Atlas Shrugged was “The Strike”

imho, kind of like an economic salting of what would otherwise be conspicuous consumptive discovery (therefore UBI is worthwhile on the basis of identity).

“… rage is directed precisely against those who actually do get to do meaningful work”

reflective of this deeply hard wired outrage: 🐵..🙈

“… rage is directed precisely against those who actually do get to do meaningful work”

reflective of this deeply hard wired outrage: 🐵..🙈

https://youtu.be/-KSryJXDpZo?si=hFu-Ca0d0txYTmC5

more work required to build and maintain the physical world over the digital world

Have you read Noah Smiths rebuttal of the BS Jobs concept? It changed my mind on the topic