Re:Many people in finance, sales and management feel their j...
by lispisok on Wednesday August 02, 2023 @02:20PM
(#36974765)
The thing about BS jobs is you could eliminate the position entirely and nothing would happen. The point of the BS job is to be filled with bodies so there is no reason to automate it.
Yes, and then firms like OpenAI come in and automate those BS jobs, and take away all the societal upside of their existence. OpenAI will thrive, at first, by undoing the intricate scaffolding of lies that buttresses BS jobs. The country will either embrace socialism at that point, or perhaps there will be a Butlerian (buttressarian?) jihad of some kind in foolish attempt to put two genies back in the bottle.
And who knows what will work to keep us alive and relatively thriving in the future? It seems clear to me that belief in a fantasy panopticon, if not taken to an extreme, was a useful part of society. It is strictly better than a real panopticon or no panopticon - and who could have guessed that from first principles? Perhaps it really is better to have BS jobs than overt socialism. Maybe people really do feel better believing their work makes a difference rather than just existing and knowing they do nothing. Idealists want to believe that people will thrive with the truth, but I think that's demonstrably false.