Bullshit Jobs

The one thing that seemed clear to me was, if companies could hire the equivalent of a bunch of tool-using primates at a fraction of the cost of humans, they probably would.

And then what? Over a decade ago, the anthropologist David Graeber wrote an essay in a small magazine called Strike, titled On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs.

Later, he expanded it into a book called Bullshit Jobs, A Theory.

The theory tried to explain a strange reality that Graeber felt he'd encountered in the world.

A surprising number of people who described their own jobs as pointless.

Jobs that might be strenuous or underpaid or undervalued, but still necessary.

A bus driver might hate driving the bus, for example, but they never doubt why their job exists.

Graeber collected and analyzed survey data that led him to suggest that as many as a third or even a half of all jobs, and especially a lot of white-collar jobs, were in fact bullshit jobs.

I can't fly everywhere and be everywhere at once.

And so I wanted to write this book as a way of distilling these ideas and allowing anyone who wants to, to go online and pick up a copy and read.

And hopefully it would lead them to think about the world differently than they do.

And so I think organizations justifiably are very nervous about how the world is changing and how they have to evolve with it.

And so that's really what the talks are positioned to do, is try to help them understand, what do I do next? How do I future-proof myself? And how do I make sure that I remain competitive in this rapidly changing world? So that was the kind of driver behind the book.

And it was really a labor of love.

I tell everyone the book kind of wrote itself, but I didn't realize it was three months to get a draft.

It was... twice as long to get it edited and proofread and designed.

David Graeber wrote about this in 2018.

His book, Bullshit Jobs.

He estimated that 37 to 40% of workers in the UK and Netherlands felt their jobs were pointless.

But Graeber was focused on meaninglessness.

The problem is that those sectors are also vulnerable to AI in analysis, modeling, compliance, risk assessment, contract review, and clerical work.

The fire industries and bullshit jobs.

The political consequences of AI's impact on the fire industries, finance, insurance, and real estate sectors also present a distinct and unpredictable picture.

A significant proportion of the jobs it contains fall into what the late David Graeber famously termed bullshit jobs, positions whose social function is sufficiently opaque that even their occupants would struggle to justify their necessity.

Whether the elimination of many of these positions through automation would constitute a genuine loss is, to say the least, debatable.

What is less debatable is that the sector has so far proven more durable to AI displacement than many predicted, remaining one of the few labor markets still reliably absorbing credentialed graduates, including a substantial number from STEM and humanities fields who did not find positions in their trained areas.

And I would just say, fuck me, I love reading anything David Graeber writes.

His work Bullshit Jobs is one of my all-time faves.

The Dawn of Everything is, I think, one of the most important books of the 21st century.

He's so pure.

... or becoming so good that you could sort of, you know, achieve fame or money or global standing through your chess playing.

On the topic of the relationship between work and purpose, I'm a big fan of David Graeber's [beep] Jobs book.

And I think if there's one thing we've learned from technological progress over the years, it's that like yes, it can minimize some activities, maybe automate some production, but it also tends to lead to even more work, right? Like we find other stuff to do, and it's not even necessarily productive stuff.

A lot of work is built on just social relationships.