<story><title>Many people in finance, sales and management feel their jobs are pointless</title><url>https://www.news.uzh.ch/en/articles/media/2023/Jobs.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>chongli</author><text>I don&amp;#x27;t think it&amp;#x27;s going to be in any way easy to convince people that it&amp;#x27;s okay not to be useful. No matter how times we care to repeat it, people will still feel dejected and hollow. &amp;quot;What is the meaning of my life?&amp;quot; is a difficult enough question to answer when you&amp;#x27;re a philosopher who has studied the problem academically and you&amp;#x27;re surrounded by other people going about their productive lives and overcoming various challenges in order to survive.&lt;p&gt;Now we&amp;#x27;re supposed to have millions of people face the question and at the same time tell them &amp;quot;no, there&amp;#x27;s nothing useful for you to do, robots can already do it faster, cheaper, and more efficiently than you will ever manage.&amp;quot; So, what? Do we tell everyone &amp;quot;just go smoke weed and play video games&amp;quot;? Or &amp;quot;go kayaking and hiking and rockclimbing and find yourself in nature&amp;quot;? The latter will not scale. Many natural places are already overcrowded and we don&amp;#x27;t even have a post-work economic system in place.</text></item><item><author>ryandrake</author><text>The &amp;quot;Bullshit Jobs&amp;quot; phenomenon was identified decades ago by Buckminster Fuller:&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;We must do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian-Darwinian theory, he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;As more and more work becomes automated or done by robots, we have less and less to actually do, but with a growing population. So we make up all this work and have 1&amp;#x2F;2 the population digging holes so the other 1&amp;#x2F;2 can fill them in. I fully expect that by the time my [eventual] grandchildren enter the workforce, more than 50% (maybe more than 75%) of jobs will be make-work that just serves to employ people so that society doesn&amp;#x27;t fall apart.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>bonniemuffin</author><text>Instead of telling people to play video games or go kayaking, I hope we can ask them to go play checkers with the elderly, read to children, hold hands with dying people in hospice, and mentor the formerly-incarcerated. These are &amp;quot;jobs&amp;quot; that I would argue robots cannot meaningfully fill, but which society would benefit from a lot more of.</text></comment>
<story><title>Many people in finance, sales and management feel their jobs are pointless</title><url>https://www.news.uzh.ch/en/articles/media/2023/Jobs.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>chongli</author><text>I don&amp;#x27;t think it&amp;#x27;s going to be in any way easy to convince people that it&amp;#x27;s okay not to be useful. No matter how times we care to repeat it, people will still feel dejected and hollow. &amp;quot;What is the meaning of my life?&amp;quot; is a difficult enough question to answer when you&amp;#x27;re a philosopher who has studied the problem academically and you&amp;#x27;re surrounded by other people going about their productive lives and overcoming various challenges in order to survive.&lt;p&gt;Now we&amp;#x27;re supposed to have millions of people face the question and at the same time tell them &amp;quot;no, there&amp;#x27;s nothing useful for you to do, robots can already do it faster, cheaper, and more efficiently than you will ever manage.&amp;quot; So, what? Do we tell everyone &amp;quot;just go smoke weed and play video games&amp;quot;? Or &amp;quot;go kayaking and hiking and rockclimbing and find yourself in nature&amp;quot;? The latter will not scale. Many natural places are already overcrowded and we don&amp;#x27;t even have a post-work economic system in place.</text></item><item><author>ryandrake</author><text>The &amp;quot;Bullshit Jobs&amp;quot; phenomenon was identified decades ago by Buckminster Fuller:&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;We must do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian-Darwinian theory, he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;As more and more work becomes automated or done by robots, we have less and less to actually do, but with a growing population. So we make up all this work and have 1&amp;#x2F;2 the population digging holes so the other 1&amp;#x2F;2 can fill them in. I fully expect that by the time my [eventual] grandchildren enter the workforce, more than 50% (maybe more than 75%) of jobs will be make-work that just serves to employ people so that society doesn&amp;#x27;t fall apart.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>shanusmagnus</author><text>My conviction is that there are literally infinite ways to be useful, and always will be, even if the robot overlords work perfectly, which they won&amp;#x27;t.&lt;p&gt;My other conviction is that people find their own meaning with absurd ease when they&amp;#x27;re children.  Then that becomes non-viable.  If it ever were to become viable again -- if they didn&amp;#x27;t have to work at the gas station to cling to existence that keeps them from sleeping under a bridge -- then their ability to find meaning will come back.</text></comment>