Listen to Steve read this post below (6m audio)

A huge amount of jobs people do are already unnecessary.

Therefore, AI or a robot being able to do these jobs is totally irrelevant. Of course, this isn’t you! But it was definitely me…

Early on in my career, before I started my first software company, I worked in marketing for multinational consumer goods companies. I was in brand management — and much of what you can do depends on your marketing budget. On a number of occasions, my budgets got cut. This was so the company could make its profit numbers for the year. It meant I could no longer do much of the work that was planned to generate sales. I literally did nothing for months on end.

I mean, I did some busy work — ran reports, did some market share updates to present to management, stuff like that — but none of it mattered. It was totally pointless. I had days and weeks where I just surfed the web, went to meetings, spoke to people in the office and had coffees.

I was earning well over $100k, and this was over 20 years ago. And I wasn’t alone — others in the firms I was at were in the same situation. And it wasn’t just once. Of the 4 companies I worked at, it happened at 2 of them. Months of getting paid for doing nothing. In addition to this, all of these companies had many of the people in their corporate head offices doing ‘internal busy work’. Stuff someone wants done inside the building, but has no impact on the performance of the company or wider society — other than to give the person doing the work an income. I imagine there’s a good chunk of these in every firm and government department.

Of course, this doesn’t mean the people doing these ‘bullshit jobs’ aren’t diligent and don’t want to do their best work; it’s just a reflection of the true abundance that exists in a modern technological economy. An abundance which arrived not long after industrialisation. It’s worth remembering that before the Industrial Revolution, 90% of humans worked in food production; now it’s around 5% in Western economies.

In the corporate environment, lots of people are there simply because the company can afford it, not because they create anything. A colleague said to me: “Unless you’re in the factory making the products that go in the brown cardboard boxes, or driving the truck to deliver it, not much that happens at head office really matters – we are riding the work that was done years ago.” I never forgot that.

Just think back to COVID times. (Sorry!) We found out very quickly which jobs were necessary. I wasn’t one of them. It was all the functional stuff — people making the food, keeping the lights on, helping the sick and infirmed. During the pandemic, an estimated 34–43% of the workforce were in essential industries. So when we take this uncomfortable reality into account — what is actually essential — and add this to the people in other non-essential industries, who are, let’s call them, optional workers, then we can really see the truth of being replaced by machines.

The net outcome of all this is quite simple. Humans invent work because we can. Because the company can afford it, and because we want to have a little empire of people under us — not because there is no other way to get things done, or even because a task needs done at all.

It’s one of the main reasons (though there are others) – why I don’t panic when people say AI will cause a job apocalypse. And when it comes to recent announcements of companies laying off staff due to AI, it’s mostly to justify cost cuts and be seen as innovative, applying AI and thereby drive a share price boost. And of course, these jobs will pop up somewhere else. They always do.

Steve

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