I’ve been saying it for a long time — a lot of jobs out there are BS jobs. David Graeber wrote a book with that title in 2018. People get paid to sit around and wait for the phone to ring. People get paid to put little numbers in little boxes in spreadsheets that no one will ever look at. People get paid to do nothing.
Artificial Intelligence (just simple logical processing of low-level procedures) is a going to rock this world. People who are bored at work, people who can do their job remotely — these people are very likely to be unemployed in the next 5 years because of AI.
I see 50% unemployment as being a likely outcome. Maybe not 5 years from now, but soon. Society has to start thinking about what we will do when MOST of the population does not have the ability to contribute their labor to the economy.
This is not a trivial problem.
This is not about boredom at work.
No question.
Even farming exhibits this.
Just as we now have more people employed as bureaucrats at the U.S. Department of Agriculture than there are farmers in the U.S., we will end up with huge numbers of people employed in the “business” of regulating and managing AI — for government, for corporations, for political advocacy groups, etc.
One of the causes of the Great Depression was automation of farming. Food prices went down, but it put farm workers out of a job, who thus couldn’t afford to buy the food, even at the lowered prices.
Back then, a much larger percentage of the workforce was in agriculture.
About 30 years ago upper management at the Fortune 500 company I worked for figured this out.
An entire floor, over 100 middle managers were laid off.
We became more efficient and productive.
I see 100% unemployment, then 0% unemployment.
An extinct race (humans) does not need jobs.