The Last Job You’ll Ever Have
A message to workers — while there’s still work.
It's unpleasant to fire people, so they won't, at first.
For a brief period, firms will be more productive than they've ever been, as each employee becomes a manager of organizations of agents that are able to take over, one by one, the tasks that constitute their job.
It'll start with jobs which can be done fully remotely. A drop-in remote worker. Your employer might ask you to install software that tracks each of your key presses, your movements. It'll be introduced as "improvements to productivity", and it will. You'll be there, guiding those agents, providing them with feedback, seeing whether they've done their job successfully.
But, gradually, you'll realize that the firm is hiring fewer and fewer new staff. Contracts are not being renewed. With all the extra time, you've taken on additional responsibilities. Where you've previously relied on interns to do the menial work of your job, it's now fully automated.
Remember, during COVID, how you marveled at remote work, how easy it was for you to perform every function you needed to, all communication, just by pressing keys and moving your mouse. Turns out, that was your downfall. That's all you were. Key presses, mouse movements, and the intelligence to determine which to activate, in which order.
You'll become less and less busy, as the system becomes more and more independent. Then one day, you'll get a request for a meeting with your boss. Or, probably an email. Please submit your resignation. We'll offer you such incredibly generous severance pay. And that'll probably be your last job. And that pay may be the last contribution to your savings, before you rely on the magnanimous handouts of the government, or, less likely, the AI company doing the automation. Negotiate hard.
If you've got a bit of foresight, you can probably delay the automation by a bit. Perhaps your job is truly unique, and irreplaceable – you're like those programmers in those obscure languages, or perhaps you write your code in such a poorly organised fashion such that you might as well be writing in one. It won't buy you much time though. No one is truly unreplaceable.
If you're a blue collar worker, you use your hands, or your physical labour, you've got a couple more years. And they'll be glorious. As the former programmers and lawyers realize they've still got families to support, they'll start competing for your jobs. But, at the same time, the newly rich owners of business and the capital have run out of software luxuries. They want to build. And maintain their properties. Perhaps conduct experiments. Robotics is improving rapidly, but it's still slow. So the new elite will be willing to pay handsomely. Like your white collar counterparts, you'll be building your replacements. But things move slowly in the physical world. And so you've got a couple years.
Of course, there are the jobs for which your humanity is inherently valuable. We prefer to watch singers perform in live concerts (rather than much higher quality recordings), Magnus Carlsen play chess (compared to much higher quality stockfish), and men kick around a ball with arbitrarily imposed rules. We'll probably want the organic kind of human as a babysitter for our children, or in charge of our nuclear weapons, or doing life-saving surgery. But, honestly, maybe not.
The bar is much higher for the robots. Look at the standards we hold our self-driving ones to, with how many 9s of accuracy, compared to ourselves. The amount we prefer humans on the road we can measure in lives. But it doesn't matter. For most of the jobs in the economy, I just care that the task gets done. That my food is delivered, the my app works, that the factory is built. Those standards will be reached, and quickly exceeded.
And so, you hope. You hope that perhaps the government comes in with a welfare deal bigger than any new deal than they've ever offered before. It's now impossible for you to differentiate yourself on your merits, because, compared to the AIs, you look just the same as your least talented colleague.
Good luck.