Under blog articles, I read a blog article called Bullshit Jobs. The premise of Bullshit Jobs was that it's a book written by David Graeber, and I think it was 2011.
He looked at things like the Soviet Union, where we had a person monitoring an escalator, and just jobs that were made up to keep 100% of the population employed. And then you'll see, even if you look at the West, you've got categories of people who create box tickers and bouncers and flunkies and whatever, people that didn't actually produce any value.
With AI, and it's a terrible, tragic thing to say because people are getting laid off, and I was out of work in September, and it was devastating to me. It makes you feel less of a human. It takes away your dignity and purpose. And it's a real thing, it's a real problem we're going to have to work through.
So I've got so much compassion and sympathy for people. The question now becomes: what is the way forward? Do we create bullshit jobs and jobs that aren't of any value to fill the gap and keep everyone busy and occupied, and welfare and things like that? Or do we reallocate and re-incentivize things that need doing?
And not just that, do we start appreciating things and putting a proper value on it? So how much do we value teachers? How much do we value nurses? How much do we value doctors? Those are the things we should be incentivizing and paying what it's worth.
We live in a market society. We live in a capitalistic society. Those are tools, those are incentive models. We set the policy, we incentivize what we want. And we've been incentivizing the wrong things.
So now we have to have a serious conversation about what is valuable. Humanity is valuable.
In the past, you had a person who could open a door at a hotel, and the electric door made that automatable. But here's the thing: was it a bullshit job? It's quite nice to be greeted by someone. It's quite a good feeling. Humanity feels good.
Or a waiter. You could get a robot to deliver your meal, or you could get it from a vending machine, but it's that human interaction, it's the connection, it's the purpose. Someone making food by hand, putting love into it, putting creativity into it.
I think what this AI stuff has done is it's really brought forth an existential question: what do we want the future to look like from a humanity point of view, from a purpose point of view, and questioning what we do truly value?