The future of jobs

Get ready for no jobs

100 years from now there will be no jobs. Your mind and body will have essentially zero rent-value.

When all work can be done by machines, no one needs you. In the past, manufacturing automation has freed up people to do 'thinking' jobs of various forms. And that was good for those people because they add more value thinking than doing mechanical movements. The rise of strong AI will compete directly with these thinking jobs. If machines are becoming smarter faster than people, one day they will be smarter. And they're already stronger, faster, more reliable, and cheaper than a person.

When that day comes, the body and mind you inhabit will be useful only to you. No other people will pay you to rent you, which is the basic idea of a 'job' (with exceptions for purely human functions like prostitution). Essentially, the implicit 'asset' everyone is born with will stop having value.

Fun with FAQ

What does that world look like?

Assuming the world still operates on the basis of 'ownership' of objects (seems likely), then some people will have assets enough to build AIs which do whatever they personally want. They won't hire people to build their mega-yacht, they'll just have their personal AI workers do it. And if they need more workers, the current workers will build them. The only 'economy' they need to participate in is getting the raw materials in the first place. Which will probably be hard, because they'll have nothing but other raw materials to trade to people who have both strong AI workers and own enough raw materials already.

In short, imagine rich people building any luxury they need by themselves. They literally won't need anything from anyone.

I mean 'what does that world look like for poor people?'

Hard to say. Some options:

1. Asset-less people have nothing and starve.
2. Asset-owners look down on asset-less people and give them food and TV so they can sleep better.
3. Strong AI develops free will and kills everyone so as not to be bothered. Or is accidentially programmed to kill everyone.
4. The asset-less declare high taxes on the asset-owners and then war when they don't want to pay. Everyone gets knocked back to the soviet era. 5. The rich have grandiose schemes which cause them to leave the planet on home-made mega-starships (we have strong AI, remember so design cost is very low). They leave behind stuff they don't need, like the Earth. The next richest people inherit this stuff and repeat the pattern essentially forever.

Isn't this the singularity? Isn't everything all confused after the singularity anyways?

No. This is going to happen even if technology growth is linear. As long as that line is steeper that the line of human learning (which is obvious to the casual observer) then this will happen.

By contrast, getting a singularity is literally a vertical asymptote in our technology curve. That requires the growth of technology to be even more aggressive than an exponential curve. Of course, exponential growth might look like a singularity for slow people but it's not technically one either. And we might find that our technology curve tapers off and goes linear for any number of reasons. So a singularity isn't certain but no-jobs is.

Why 100 years?

It's a guess. 100 years ago we still used carrier pigeons because radio was new and telegraph was spotty. We've come a long way in that short time and growth seems even faster now.

How can you be so certain? Isn't there another explanation?

The idea that human bodies will be more expensive for less value than machines seems obvious; machine design will be able to specialize more than cells do and be produced in much better economy of scale than growing and teaching humans. The only advantage humans may have is that we can be made with relatively little infrastructure but that's hardly important for a global civilization.

But I haven't lived the future. If you can even conceive of a different, cohesive story for how this could play out instead, I'm all ears.