(2023-02-21) ZviM Escape Velocity From Bullshit Jobs

Zvi Mowshowitz: Escape Velocity from Bullshit Jobs. Without speculating here on how likely this is to happen, suppose that GPT-4 (or some other LLM or AI) speeds up, streamlines or improves quite a lot of things. What then?

To the extent that the economy is dominated by make-work, automating it away won’t work because more make-work will be created, and any automated real work gets replaced by new make-work.

There is a theory that states that if you automate away a bullshit job, it will be instantly replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory that states this has already happened.

Automating a real job can even replace it with a bullshit job.

Bullshit eats all. Eventually

We escaped the original Malthusian trap with the Industrial Revolution, expanding capacity faster than the population could grow

Presume GPT-4 allows partial or complete automation of a large percentage of existing bullshit jobs. What happens? My model says this depends on the speed of adaptation.

Can improvements outpace the bullshit growth rate?

Passing Versus Winning

It will get easier to pass a class or task the AI can help automate

It won’t get easier to be head of the class. To be the best. (zero-sum game, signaling)

Harvard is going to take the same number of students

What about a local university? What if the concern is ‘are you good enough?’ not ‘are you the best?’ If it now takes less human time to get close enough to the best application one can offer, this could indeed be highly welfare improving. The expectations and requirements for students will rise, but not enough to keep pace.

Attending the local university could get worse. If what cannot be faked is physical time in the classroom, such requirements will become increasingly obnoxious, and increasingly verified.