I wonder if AI also reveals unnecessary parts of the workforce by demonstrating that what they do is actually pretty trivial.
There are a ton of basically BS office jobs that could probably be replaced by AI, or in some cases just revealed as superfluous.
We need to just stop pretending we still need a 1:1 connection between employment and income and do UBI. Useless jobs help us preserve the illusions of a pre-post-industrial civilization. Instead of just paying people, we pay people to do work we don't need.
The joke about someone using chatGPT to write a lengthy email that the recipient will summarize with ChatGPT is the perfect example of how pretend much work is.
Something went wrong once. Maybe not even in your organization, but it went wrong somewhere. Someone added a process to make sure that the problem didn't happen again, because that's what well-run organizations are supposed to do.
But too often, people don't think about the cost of the procedure. People are going to have to follow this procedure every time the situation happens for the next N years. How much does that cost in peoples' time? In money? How much did the mistake cost? How often did it happen? So was the procedure a net gain or a net loss? People don't ask that, but instead the procedure gets written and becomes "industry best practice".
(And for some industries, it is! Aviation, medical, defense... some of those have really tight regulation, and they require strict procedures. But not every organization is in those worlds...)
So now you have poor corporate drones that have to run through that maze of procedures, over and over. Well, if GPT can run the maze for you, that's really tempting. It can cut your boredom and tedium, cut out a ton of meaningless work, and make you far faster.
But on the other hand, if you are the person who wrote the procedure, you think that it matters that it be done correctly. The form has to be filled out accurately, not with random gibberish, not even with correct-sounding-but-not-actually-accurate data. So you cannot allow GPT to do the procedures.
The procedure-writers and procedure-doers live in different worlds and have different goals, and GPT doesn't fix that at all.
There is this joke about socialism where hundreds of workers digging with shovels and somebody asks “Why not use that excavator? One machine could do it in no time” and the other answers “And put 20 men out of work? We’re creating jobs!”.
This is why a lot of modern leftists are anti-tech. Tech destroys jobs. If we are going to maintain the fiction that full employment is necessary for a modern civilization, everyone has to have a job, and for that to be true we have to restrict our technological progress.
Which is really just making a ton of people waste their time doing bullshit work. I fail to see how this is progressive.
There are a ton of basically BS office jobs that could probably be replaced by AI, or in some cases just revealed as superfluous.
We need to just stop pretending we still need a 1:1 connection between employment and income and do UBI. Useless jobs help us preserve the illusions of a pre-post-industrial civilization. Instead of just paying people, we pay people to do work we don't need.