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Could AI finally spell the end of bullshit jobs?
Right around the time cab drivers began very reluctantly accepting fares from Manhattan to Brooklyn, a new kind of man emerged in the borough’s streets. He was easily identified (and ridiculed): working boots, flannel shirt, jeans, beard. The Brooklyn hipster, or “lumbersexual,” sprang from a growing desire among a certain kind of man to reclaim the perceived masculinity of generations past.
It wasn’t exactly revolutionary. Just as Clark Griswold wielded a chainsaw and Jimmy Carter got his hands dirty well into his 90s, generations of men have nurtured basement hobbies or retreated to workshops. There’s a particular satisfaction that comes from actually making stuff, and I’m absolutely a Home Depot weekend warrior, always riding shotgun with my construction-obsessed littlest guy.
One popular thought is the desire to make and break things is primal for men, hard-wired from the very emergence of Homo sapiens. Another is that it’s a reaction to the empowerment of women, as “many areas of life that were once ‘gentlemanly’ have simply been opened to women and thus effectively demasculinized.”1 A third factor? The very nature of work today.
I recently worked on a big report about the ongoing growth of the services sector, which has for decades accelerated past manufacturing and industry to be the dominant driver of the global economy (that’s universally the case, even in countries popularly regarded as powerhouses of making stuff). Services are huge and important and providing them is increasingly how most of us make a living. But do any of us describe being camped in front of a keyboard all day as “working with our hands”?
That’s not to say modern work can’t and doesn’t provide satisfaction for both men and women. But what struck me after writing the report was the shifting nature of services work itself. I wrote last year about the proliferation of “busyness” and the tendency of large organizations to create entirely unnecessary jobs, over-engineering simple tasks to create the illusion of productivity. The truth is this happens not only within companies—there are entire industries that serve no needed purpose.
One example is health care here in the US, which is in the spotlight following the murder in Manhattan of the CEO of one of the country’s biggest health insurers. Nobel laureate and former New York Times columnist
recently noted that condemning that act “shouldn’t require pretending that health insurers play a generally productive role in our society. For the most part, they don’t.”“Let me offer a somewhat, but only somewhat, caricatured view of US health care,” Krugman said. “It’s a system in which taxpayers bear the cost of major medical care, but this taxpayer money flows through private companies that take a cut, spend a lot on administration, and do their best to deny care to people who need it.”
In a similar vein, the reliably fantastic John Lanchester last month detailed how modern finance works by describing the ways selling a mango (as a proxy for any product) could be subject to banking chicanery before the fruit ends in the hands of a consumer (I recommend reading the full description in my footnotes).2 He then notes the total value of all economic activity in the world is $105 trillion (that’s the mangoes), while the value of financial derivatives is $667 trillion (that’s the trading).
“That makes it the biggest business in the world,” Lanchester said. “And in terms of the things it produces, that business is useless. It does nothing and adds no value. It is just one speculator betting against another and for every winner, on every single transaction, there is an exactly equivalent loser.
“This, historically, is a unique state of affairs. Until now, most riches have been based on real assets of land or trade—often inherited rather than created ex novo, but no less real for that. This new form of riches is based on gambling. What does it mean about us that we reward so generously this work which does so little? What kind of society are we really? And what does it mean that we think about this so little?”3
I worry about this a lot, and it gets to that urgency men (and women) seem to increasingly feel around doing work that really matters. After all, if we valued jobs based on their contribution to the advancement of society, what professions would we prioritize? Teachers, for sure.4 Doctors. Nurses. Police. Farmers. Fun fact: these jobs happen to be precisely the ones kids’ unshaped minds regard as important. You’ll find lots of four-year-olds dressed as firefighters for Halloween; none as middle managers.
“There was a brief moment during the pandemic when the question of valuable and worthwhile work was thrown into focus by the fact that the worst-paid jobs turned out to be the ones on which we all relied: retail staff, transport workers, delivery workers. We’ve done an excellent job of forgetting about that,” Lanchester said. “At a societal level, this is unsatisfactory. To put it as mildly as possible, nobody would deliberately design a society that worked like this.”
Yet our economies are increasingly dominated by pointless roles that have no societal value. Anthropologist David Graeber calls these “bullshit jobs” and, before you think that’s harsh, about 40% of workers themselves say their jobs fit that description. Do any of these categories defined by Graeber ring a bell?
Flunkies. Jobs that exist primarily to make someone else look or feel important. For example, doormen, receptionists who aren't really needed, or administrative assistants who mostly wait around.
Goons. People hired to be aggressive or manipulative because other organizations employ similar people. Examples include corporate lawyers, telemarketers, or certain PR specialists.
Duct Tapers. Employees whose jobs exist only to fix problems that shouldn't exist in the first place. They solve temporary problems caused by flaws in the organizational system rather than addressing the underlying issues.
Box Tickers. People whose work exists primarily to allow an organization to claim it's doing something it isn't really doing. Examples include many compliance roles or positions created to fulfill bureaucratic requirements.
Taskmasters. These come in two types:
Unnecessary supervisors who manage people who don't need managing
People whose job is to create extra work for others, often by assigning tasks or creating new programs
It’s bullshit jobs like these that are theoretically the target of Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy and the newly created Department of Government Efficiently (the ridiculously-named “DOGE,” which isn’t an actual department). That efficiency gains can be made—everywhere, not just in government—is obvious. But I can’t say I have any faith in the judgment of Musk and Ramaswamy, who are driven more by the idea bureaucracy poses “an existential threat to our republic” than, say, a desire to make it easier to renew your driver’s license.
What’s already proving vastly more efficient—and ruthless and effective—in streamlining work is AI, which is engineered to eliminate often time consuming but ultimately pointless tasks. The problem, of course, is that while it allows companies to do more with less, that means doing more with fewer.
The challenge now is to address the needs of billions of workers whose roles will be dramatically altered or simply disappear. AI advocates like to point to the idea the technology will free people to do higher value work, and there’s some truth to that. But what seems to be happening is, for example, tasks that required a team of 10 are instead being largely automated, eliminating eight workers while leaving two high-performing survivors to supervise.
Those two are indeed doing “higher value” work. The problem is the fate of their colleagues that are no longer needed, and there are no easy solutions to that. New industries will spring up, sure. But they are subject to the same circle of creative destruction: companies cook up roles that aren’t really needed, AI eventually takes over those tasks, people get fired, and the cycle begins again.
I’ve no idea how this can be addressed (sorry!), and I’m not airily dismissing the fact that, given how modern economies have developed, doing a job that earns you money is inherently valuable and important. It just strikes me that we’re at something of an inflection point when it comes to identifying and cultivating work that pays well and contributes positively to society—which, of course, is the sweet spot for all of us.
It’s in that respect that I find something really interesting about AI. At a fundamental level, the technology is basically a turbocharged Google search: it doesn’t create anything original (although it may hallucinate), but aggregates vast amounts of information to spit out dispassionate conclusions. So far, what it’s telling us seems loud and clear: AI has the potential to eliminate a whole bunch of bullshit jobs, but not roles society should prioritize.
AI can’t unclog your toilet or rewire your house. It can’t fix your car or run into a burning building. And it certainly can’t perform a heart bypass or make your stay in hospital that little bit more comfortable. AI is aggregating all we know and concluding the teacher who educates and inspires our children is worth far more than the trader who creates nothing. That’s something society would do well to remember. Instead, we venerate influencers and consumerism and, as
so beautifully puts it, people who are “so poor all they have is money.”A note about whatever this is …
After writing a few thousand articles for newspapers and magazines, I spent a long time trying a bunch of other stuff. I guess I figured what came (relatively) easily must by definition be less valuable, so I wandered in the corporate wilderness, becoming increasingly frustrated and doing work that felt increasingly lousy.
Sometimes with age comes wisdom, and I’ve realized finding something (relatively) easy ain’t a bad thing. So, this is a space where I’m resurrecting writing for myself, on topics weird and wild and wonderful, all from the perspective of an Australian living in the United States.
Posts will appear when the mood takes me, but I do try to be consistently inconsistent—sometimes it’ll be a couple of days between drinks; sometimes a week. But if you subscribe, you’ll get a email letting you know I’m ranting. Again.
The solution? In 2000, Andrew Sullivan noted men’s magazines pushed “the only things left that are predominantly male—sex with women, beer, gadgets, sex with women, cars, beer, and more gadgets.” The major flaw in this argument is today obvious: while the average man still likes beer, gadgets, and cars, they’re having far too little sex. Younger men especially are instead increasingly wallowing in helplessness, mindlessly distracted on a sofa in their mum’s basement.
Here’s Lanchester’s full description:
“You live in a community that is entirely self-sufficient but produces one cash crop a year, consisting of a hundred crates of mangoes. In advance of the harvest, because it’s helpful for you to get the money now and not later, you sell the future ownership of the mango crop to a broker, for a dollar a crate. The broker immediately sells the rights to the crop to a dealer who’s heard a rumour that thanks to bad weather mangoes are going to be scarce and therefore extra valuable, so he pays $1.10 a crate. A speculator on international commodity markets hears about the rumour and buys the future crop from him for $1.20. A specialist ‘momentum trader’, who picks up trends in markets and bets on their continuation (yes, they do exist), comes in and buys the mangoes for $1.30. A specialist contrarian trader (they exist too) picks up on the trend in prices, concludes that it’s unsustainable and short-sells the mangoes for $1.20. Other market participants pick up on the short-selling and bid the prices back down to $1.10 and then to $1. A further speculator hears that the weather this growing season is now predicted to be very favourable for mangoes, so the crop will be particularly abundant, and further shorts the price to 90 cents, at which point the original broker re-enters the market and buys back the mangoes, which causes their price to return to $1. At which point the mangoes are harvested and shipped off the island and sold on the retail market, where an actual customer buys the mangoes, say for $1.10 a crate.
“Notice that the final transaction is the only one in which a real exchange takes place. You grew the mangoes and the customer bought them. Everything else was finance – speculation on the movement of prices. In between the time when they were your mangoes and the time when they became the customer’s mangoes, there were nine transactions. All of them amounted to a zero-sum activity. Some people made money and some lost it, and all of that cancelled out. No value was created in the process.”
Analogous to this is the boom in gambling generally in the US—on sports, crypto, and stocks—which Krugman recently described as “the new opioids.”
Am I biased because my parents were teachers, as is my fiancée? Sure. That doesn’t make me wrong.