Who's saying that lady's job is bullshit just because it can be automated? There is real value in paying some up front cost in detection/monitoring/validation of data to prevent mistakes. Just because software engineers would consider her job "beneath" them because they could do it faster or better does not make it not worth doing.

There are mega-efficient factory farms in Nebraska that are immensely productive per-human involved, but that doesn't mean what hobby farmers in Connecticut or subsistence farmers in Africa are doing is bullshit.

I think "bullshit jobs" are less of a thing than people believe. It's just that people devalue assembly-line or cog-in-machine work, even when they're the ones doing it - especially in the US where we grow up wanting to be a unique success story like an entertainment celebrity or rich entrepreneur and so that kind of work is antithetical to our idea of a successful person. Fact of the matter is, machines needs cogs, and we don't have an infinite capacity to replace human cogs with automated ones.

Does she find that task enjoyable and fulfilling? If not, it's bullshit.

And if bet money on it NOT being enjoyable and fulfilling. Humans almost universally hate being cogs doing the same repetitive trivial action over and over.

Do janitors find their job enjoyable and fulfilling? Probably not. Their job is still important for the functioning of society, so I wouldn't call it bullshit.

I was a janitor for a long time in my younger years, and I actually did find it enjoyable and fulfilling. Just sayin'.

What did you enjoy about it? Curious!

I enjoyed that what I did made a real impact on people, I enjoyed the sense of satisfaction from making a space nice again, and I enjoyed that it wasn't intellectually demanding, which gave me plenty of time every workday to think about hard programming problems.

There's a real sense of accomplishment in it, and it's nice that people can immediately see and enjoy the results of your hard work. There's also something about doing manual labor that is satisfying.

And I enjoyed being "invisible" around people who used the spaces I cleaned. You usually don't exist, so people tend to continue to speak to each other as if nobody else is listening. I learned a lot about people that way.

The 'probably not' bit of your reasoning is self serving.

> so instead we basically do UBI through inefficient, unnecessary jobs.

Your first 3 bullet points make sense, but this last one is where I think the normal theory behind "bullshit jobs" really falls apart. Every individual business has a large, strong economic incentive to not hire these bullshit jobs if they don't need to, so why should we think they would be so generous to engage in this "bullshit jobs charity"?

I think what is really happening is that as society advances, lots of rules, regulations and processes just build up and up over time, and this complexity eventually becomes self-sustaining, even if it greatly diverges from the original intent of the original rules.

Case in point (which is a common case I know) is the complete, total insanity of the US healthcare system, specifically how healthcare is paid for. Literally every single person I know that has ever gotten into some aspect of healthcare payments (potentially with an idea to improve the madness) eventually comes to the conclusion "The whole system is completely fucked, it should all just be torn down and greatly simplified." The problem, though, is now there are a ton of entrenched interests who depend on that complexity for their livelihood (I heard it referred to as "an abusive relationship" - Company A exists to "simplify some aspects of healthcare payments", which means they depend on the underlying complexity in the first place to exist), so there are no real incentives from the people that control the levers to simplify. So a lot of those bullshit jobs come about to manage that complexity, but it's not like some company thought "let's hire people to do busywork so they'll have employment."

Whilst business owners have a financial incentive not to employ people, there are competing incentives. For example, non-owners are incentivised to have more people reporting to them because it increases their status and status is usually correlated with salary. In fact, when you are rich enough that money doesn't mean anything any more, you may as well have a bunch of people employed to do nothing but make you feel important and powerful.

> In fact, when you are rich enough that money doesn't mean anything any more, you may as well have a bunch of people employed to do nothing but make you feel important and powerful.

I’d just like to proactively coin the term “Ego Engineer” for the post-AGI world.

Traditionally they'd be called "elevator operator" or "doorman" or some equally mundane/superfluous job.

Interesting choices, given that both of those are putting humanity into what would otherwise be purely mechanical jobs.

Practicality of having someone able to adapt to novel situations aside, there's something to be said for just having a human interaction.

From a purely profit focused standpoint, these jobs should very rarely exist. And yet, due to other incentives they do. E.g. because the owner might like being greeted on their way to work.

GP's last point isn't to be taken literally. It's just the short and snappy summary of what took you many words to describe.

Yes, that's how it is. For every reform that would benefit society as a whole, there is now a tiny minority of certain losers with a deeply entrenched lobby against the new and for the old. Be it fossil fuels, health care, banking, peace in the Middle East, nuclear technology, the use of genetic engineering in plant breeding, electric vehicles, and so on.

I don't think UBI would change that, but UBI might have a chance to change the perception of one's job as a bullshit job (they say that's 40% of the workforce).

> certain losers with a deeply entrenched lobby

Excellent point and phrasing! And it suggests what needs to be done to move things along: (a) make them not losers & (b) decrease the ability to entrench lobbying.

To (a), I don't think we do enough of directly buying out stakeholders. E.g. if we know moving to single-payer insurance would be beneficial to the system as a whole (we probably don't, but just an example), why not explicitly pay off private insurance companies, phased out over 10 years? Everyone would still win!

To (b), the key is the corruption of should-be-objective decisions. To me, regulatory-industry revolving doors are the most important, because they're the greatest source of invisible-at-the-time corruption (e.g. you sway a decision... 15 years later you get a cushy "retirement job" in industry). Fundamentally, I don't think there's a way you get around that, absent banning it (above a certain level of regulatory authority) and substituting equivalent economic compensation. Continuously finding selfless, competent people to staff regulatory services is not a sustainable model. So pay them so the "selfless" isn't a requirement (even if you have to tax industry more heavily to do so).

> I think what is really happening is that as society advances, lots of rules, regulations and processes just build up and up over time, and this complexity eventually becomes self-sustaining, even if it greatly diverges from the original intent of the original rules.

This is one theory, I think a slightly different explanation could be that most corporations are too large for the people making decisions regarding things like layoffs to be able to have a clear picture of what each employee is doing

Also like a sibling comment said, there are also conflicting incentives like middle management engaging in empire building. Because of this, there isn't any vertical enforcement or clarity

Really interesting how much better complexity scales in software than it does in business

You're conflating the internal (lack of) logic from the perspective of the person employed in a bullshit job with the external logic for the existence of this position. Businesses hire people for multitude economically sound reasons and very often from the perspective of the person the job is utterly meaningless except for providing them with a paycheck. That leads to psychic pain. The economic logic is there and moving the needle but the social, cultural, psychological logic is lacking. That is the problem. I think the theory is sound: that disconnect between economic logic and other levels of meaning is at the source of the problem. There's no grounds to dismiss it by reducing all logic to economic logic.