A lot of people think jobs will go away through a combination of AI and robotics, but there is little historical evidence to justify this. Farmers couldn’t really imagine jobs that didn’t involve cows or wheat —and nobody really even knew what other stuff there was to want once there was enough food for everyone— but then almost all of them wound up in cities working in factories making stuff that had only previously existed in science fiction stories.
The intractable problem is you can’t completely wave away the inability to fulfill human all wants inside of a material universe. If I tried to explain what I do to one of my Slavic ancestors I think they would have a hard time understanding it and mostly want to know if, seriously, there were no Turks coming to make them slaves anymore. Each new generation comes up with things they absolutely must have and then that becomes the new basic requirement for life.
Hint: you’re reading this article on one such basic requirement right now.
This is obvious if you talk about things like beach front property. There’s only so much beach front property. Not everyone can have beach front property. We could build houses instantly, for free, and not everyone could have a beach front house. It just doesn’t work that way because coast lines are finite. The singularity might do some weird terraforming stuff but you can’t make infinite beach front property.
So, what’s left after every material resource is infinitely abundant and all that’s left are those niche examples of default limited things? When all you materially desire can be brought to you with a snap of your fingers, what else could you possibly want? Let’s outline what is still scarce for baseline humans in a world of free-to-configure matter and energy.
Scarcity in the Post-Scarcity World
Attention
You can only pay attention to and care about so many things. It’s a hard-set limit and while you can imagine things that would expand it, I think that only alters the scale not the frame. You can’t pay attention to everything all of the time even when your brain is the size of a solar system. If you don’t believe that, imagine you’re trying to pay attention to your brain at high fidelity, which in turn creates a recursion problem with no mathematical limit.
Individual relationships
This is a finite number and cannot be greatly expanded. You can only spend your time around so many people. You could become not human, but then this piece really wouldn’t be that interesting to you. And still, like the solar system brain thing, you can’t extend this forever. I would also, generally, advise against trying to modify yourself in such ways. To anyone reading this in the future: Being human is stable and awesome.
Communal Contentment
Admit it, you care what other people are doing and if it’s stuff you generally approve of them doing. Well, tough luck because now all of them have magic lamps and can do anything with the genie inside. So now there’s a limited number of people who want the same kinds of things you want. Who has time to appreciate their thousands of robotic servants? Think of society!
Meaning
People still need this and it gets harder when you can have all of your material wants met with a snap of your fingers. Lots of people think they want a sex robot harem, and maybe even having one for a century or two would feel like “Yes, what else would I do with my time? Say all you want, but boobs. Big round squishy boobs. If that’s not enough, butts! And penises, lest we forget.” But then one day you’re three-hundred years old and you look over and your robot harem is recharging against the wall or something, and you’ve cycled through every possible kink a dozen or more times, it’s all boring now because nobody can even be bothered to call you a degenerate, and you realize you’re just the oldest pervert in existence who was given the power to become anything and chose from infinite options to masturbate for three centuries. You discover that the truest Karmic retribution from doing sinful things isn’t that you get smote by a flaming sword, but that you become the kind of person who should be smote by a flaming sword and eventually that self-knowledge is inescapable. The flaming sword would be a relief! This isn’t going away even in humans that are significantly different than we are.
So, here’s a list of jobs that I think will still exist after the singularity.
Jobs from the Future
Movie/Music/Content Consumer
In the future, anyone can make a movie or a song or a great novel with a snap of their fingers. Maybe they do a bit of back and forth prompting while they’re growing up, but eventually some algorithm somewhere learns the exact kind of media content each person likes and everyone has their own personal Netflix, Spotify, or Kindle service that gives them content that they will enjoy maximally. It even helps hone your tastes over time so you become a more and more sophisticated critic of the thing you enjoy. There is literally no human on Earth who could make movies better than your AI director.
But you have the itch, don’t you? The creative bug?
So you do it, you spend maybe an entire week making an epic film. Something that is really your best possible work. You wrote several paragraphs worth of prompts! Now what? You want someone to watch it. Except they can all watch any movie they want. You could get friends, sure, but are they going to give you real, honest feedback? Nobody wants to watch your movie in the sense that they all have their own much more preferable movies already.
So you stand outside a theater with tickets, each redeemable for a set price to be paid from your account with a bonus to be paid for a review of any kind. The most watched films in the future have been watched by maybe a few hundred people.
Decade Reenactor
A lot of people in the future will be alive from a long time ago. If immortality drugs take off in the next ten or twenty years, you’ll have people from the 1960’s walking around a thousand years from now. Baby Boomers currently have over half of the wealth in the world. What if all of that stock in those retirement accounts takes off and it just keeps growing? Eternal disproportionate wealth is a real possibility. After a while, at least on a part time basis, they’ll feel nostalgic for the way things were when they were young and the world was normal.
So one of the ways you’ll make passive income is by pretending you’re living in a different historical period. You’ll forego some of the creature comforts of the future but you’ll spend your time drifting back and forth from “The Sixties” to “The Nineties” wearing period appropriate clothing, using period appropriate jargon, referencing period appropriate media, for a handful of rich people who are funding the whole thing. Behind closed doors, it’s the future but otherwise you’re driving around in your AMC Gremlin to see Jaws and Star Wars over and over again.
Non-Cybernetic Jiu Jitsu Instructor
Sure, you can download any knowledge through your Neuralink but you know what’s super grounding? Learning Jiu Jitsu the old fashioned way. There is in fact a whole category of jobs like this where people with bespoke, antique, organic knowledge pass it onto you organically. Tons of people will be employed making and teaching things with long pedigrees back to before the singularity. Sure, you may have downloaded your multiple black belts in various martial arts in a fit of teenage boredom via NeuraLink, but I have my blue belt in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu through organic, super-grounding hard work, and from a lineage that goes back to the Gracies. You can’t fake that level of authenticity. If you can download large swaths of your identity from other people’s experiences, then the thing that matters the most are what you choose to experience on your own.
Thing Experiencer
If you can record and send experiences, knowledge, and skills via NeuraLink then someone has to go out there and record those things. Think of a lifestyle YouTuber but telephathic. You go out and learn beekeeping in exquisite detail, section off those parts of your brain that are dedicated to beekeeping, your NeuraLink uploads these into one giant file called something like “Emily’s Experience of BeeKeeping” and then it goes to #1 on the Apple Experience Store for its fundamental reusability across different personality types and for its overall calming side-effects. Religious experience or even skepticism could be transmitted in the same way and some of these will probably also be public contagions like, “Robert’s Conviction for Communism” and have to be banned.
Imagine saying, “My nephew is so useless that he couldn’t even get a job as a Joblessness Experiencer!”
Hobbits for Orbital Shire Project
Everything will fall out of copyright, eventually, and a lot of old media will have similar nostalgia power as the decades. So some rich people will band together and build an orbital habitat that’s basically Middle Earth. You’ll agree to become a hobbit through genetic engineering and part of your benefits package will be your de-conversion to baseline human normal at the end of your service period. But for however long, you agree to live and behave as a hobbit and you group shares the more limited resources of the closed habitat and hide all high-technology use behind the narrative of elf magic, or whatever.
Highly-skilled hobbits will be called upon to reenact various hobbit storylines form the works of Tolkien. During private character-breaking discussions people will say things like, “Ted? He’s been hobbiting for twenty years now, and I hear he’s got an actual chunk of pre-singularity plastic back home. Lucky son of a bitch, you know they hardly had to modify him to make him look like that?”
Anthropic Emotional Validator
This is like a therapist or a friend, but professional. Again, anyone can tear themselves away into infinite amusement at their choosing. There are limited friend options. People used to be able to get this for free by going to a bar, but nobody does that anymore. Everyone has their own bar. So if you want someone to pay attention to you, you better pay. This person will nod along to all of your complaints, deeply commiserate with you, say wonderful and insightful things about your life and be so charming in general that you forget that you paid them to do all of these things.
Mills Baker will be the most highly compensated person doing this job.
Mystical Whittler
People will still get super depressed about everything in the future. There has to be some sense of overall divine purpose. So what do they need? How about a guy that looks kind of like Tom Bombadil, chewing a piece of straw and whittling a tiny block of wood, who appears as if from nowhere to say one single profound thing at the exact right moment to change their life radically? Another primary function of the job is to disappear without a trace the moment the recipient of your message turns their head slightly. How does the payment work? Mumble mumble mumble superintelligence. Maybe increased micro surcharges on other goods that get paid out over a longer period of time and which the payer consented to at some point but cannot directly validate on their own.
This will be my job and will involve lots of psychological study and escape artistry training.
Priest, Politician, and Prostitute
The most Lindy of all professions. Yep, all of these will still exist after a world with infinite material abundance. Although in the last case, the job will be much more about meaning. All the low-hanging fruit of human wants can be taken care of by robots so this would be a significantly altering force on prostitution. I think it would be more like having a paid spouse for some period of time because all the purely bestial desires would be cared for otherwise. As for the priest, someone has to tell you it’s okay to be able to have everything you want so long as you say no to the things you shouldn’t want but what does a priest look like in the world of NeuraLink? Is it someone who records and transmits Faith, Hope, and Love to their congregation? And the politician is there to reify what you believe the future should be and how people should live with the present circumstances, except now what they’re doing is trying to manipulate the data sets seen by the giant AI’s running in the background making this society function to drive different outcomes.
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