I can't imagine it. If you somehow started with such a world, a few people would decide to really focus on one thing and get better at it, and others would follow, and eventually you'd end up with labor specialization like we have now.
> Imagine everybody would be competent doctor and farmer and entertainer and so on : all competent.
So we're pretending we're living in a world like it's that one Matrix scene where Trinity instantly learns to fly a helicopter?
> What would the labor market look like?
My guess is that it would look like the distribution of the demand on resources. So something like what we have today, just with more automation since everyone also is competent at automating things.
It would look like any relatively flat commodity market like oil, gas, feed grain, etc. Indeed "one hour of human time" would be something you could index like one barrel of oil.
My mother was a nurse. I could never be a nurse. She took care of people who were at deaths door. She cleaned up blood, poo, semen. She suffered racist abuse, was physically attacked and hospitalised many times. She did this job for 45 years.
I could never do that because I just don't care about other humans like that. She had a different type of intelligence to me. She wasn't better than me, we were different, but it was a fundamental difference that could not be learned.
I lack the right words but, your mother sounds like an awesome person.
> I could never do that because I just don't care about other humans like that. She had a different type of intelligence to me. She wasn't better than me, we were different, but it was a fundamental difference that could not be learned.
A beautiful thing about us humans is that we are more similar than different in many ways, but our interests, tendencies and experiences draw us to certain individual behaviors, so we develop diverse skills, knowledge and temperaments. This duality is what I think makes us so powerful.
If skills to perform a job are no longer a differentiator, I think wages would be less differentiated between jobs.
Perhaps there would still be wage differentiation, but dependent more on factors like degree of physical output necessary, risk of physical injury when performing the job, etc.
Actually, I think you'd see wages reflect peoples' willingness to do a job. So for example, you'd probably see higher wages for a job cleaning up human feces than for a job driving a delivery truck. You'd also continue to see the current wage increase for jobs involving high risk (danger pay) or extended journeys such as ship captain, astronaut, long-haul trucking.
This was approximately the case among hunter-gatherers, and in the early agricultural period the jobs were still easily learnable. Over times, some jobs became dependent on specialized abilities or skills. The world is better for it.
A market has two sides: supply and demand. The assumptions only involves the supply side but we do not know much about demand, so would be hard to give a full picture of how the market would look like.
That's said, if we have ample supply of any given commodity/occupation, then the market will greatly shaped by what the demands look like.
One way I think we could curb AI wealth inequality is if we regulate that all AI agents or robots (who produce useful work) must be associated with a real human and their fiscal number.
If a factory needs 200 droids then 10% of droid generated profit goes to the real human associated with that droid.
If a lawyer office needs 200 processes running AI agents searching through common law cases then 200 ppl would have to receive a fee for AI agents' use.
You can extrapolate to anything you want but basically the idea that very few humans actually need to work but that all 'work' must be regulated and associated to a real human with a real fiscal entity, not simply a thread or a company asset in the case of a physical robot.
In this scenario the question of a single uber human, master of all trades, no longer makes sense.
Not all automayed jobs are alike, and you can still make money through other non automated means, including entrepeneurship, but this restriction could probably enable UBI.
It'd be interesting if you had a brain tumor and could just ask your neighbor to operate it out - but I guess you'd still need to rent an operating room.
I guess humans would be like general purpose computers that you can program to do anything (let's assume all of the computers are equally specced). You said "entertainer", so it makes me wonder if people will still be wowed by acting or singing performances if they could also do it as competently. Would humans have to be like Borg units in this scenario?
But to return to the labor market, I guess no one get's paid 6 figures because they're "one of the few" that can architect the JSON for a webapp for some food delivery service, everyone can do that! People would still buy food because maybe not everyone wants to be a farmer, and people would still buy plane tickets because there are not enough resources to build everyone a plane (or an operating room).
After watching this (long) documentary about status anxiety[1] (or shorter summary: [2]) I like to see things from that perspective. Would the labor market have financial advisors if we're all competent at managing our wealth, would we even be chasing wealth (which we mostly do because IMO it's a status symbol) if we're all equal?
This is more or less the case with most labor and service industry jobs.
If you were to say, "I'll let you out of this concentration camp if a week from now you become a top-1% waiter, a top-1% bus-boy, a top-1% heavy thing mover", etc then at least half of all (healthy) people could do it.
As a result the work is commoditized, doesn't pay much, and doesn't come with much social respect.
Employers hire agencies to hire laborers to fill quotas. They don't much care whom they're hiring as long as they show up on time, sober, and don't cause trouble while working. The employee's thoughts on process optimization are to be kept to themselves.
I was just watching the news and a deafblind medical student was talking about her hope to become a doctor. I was inspired by her spirit but wondered how this would work in practical terms. There seems to be a cultural shift towards supporting the hopes and dreams of individuals and a fear of causing offence.If anyone has a framework for how they think through this issue I would love to hear it?
Help her question and understand the underlying reason(s) why she wants to go into medicine. (status, money, wanting to help other, being intellectually challenge, curiosity for anatomy/biology, ...)
Find other fields where those wants can be better met by a deafblind person.
Help her reframe her initial idea into one of these field.
Things would look roughly the same or possibly worse.
Some things are just due to luck. That luck would compound over the years, like it already does. All the skill in the world will do you no good if you don't have the resources to capitalize on it.
We would also begin to discriminate on things other than pure skill. Since skill is flat, you could hire based on hair length, whether you like the person, etc.
Some of the greatest minds of our time asked what were thought to be absurd questions. It's just that others didn't have the intellect to understand the reason behind the question.
I think that we're basically there now. 90% of people could do my job if they were trained and interested. And I could do 90% of jobs if I had to and could get trained.
There are a tiny number of jobs that require a special physical skills (steady handed surgeons). But they're rare. And a certain number of people couldn't do certain tasks physically or physiologically (most people could learn to dissect a body correctly, some people would never stop vomiting).
My initial thought was that there would be high offer on some jobs while low offer on others, causing high demand for some jobs and low demand for others. That would cause differences in prices for each job.
However nobody would like to pay more than they charge for their own jobs, since they're compentent in that other task too. That would lead to people spending more time with tasks they don't like because they are more expense to hire someone to do it. Sad world.
To fix that, since everybody is competent in everything, they could organize themselves to rotate the jobs. Each person would be responsible for that job for a period of time, then they'd rotate. That could work with highly regulated jobs (like medicine or politics) but wouldn't work for others (like software development, gardening, etc). That would force a lot of energy to be spent in regulation. Less freedom. Sad world.
Finally, it doesn't matter if we're leveling people's competency by the highest or lowest level of competency available in any field, if they are always the same, that means there is no growth and there would be less networking and connection among people. A sad world.
On the other hand if they started at the same level of competency but could actually become more competent by exercising some job, than we'd create a difference. Given the time and the compounding effect, these differences would grow, causing people to look each other with respect and setting targets for themselves to reach higher levels of competency in a particular field.
The differences is what makes us special. They lead to growth. We should respect all the differences.
39 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 101 ms ] threadSo we're pretending we're living in a world like it's that one Matrix scene where Trinity instantly learns to fly a helicopter?
> What would the labor market look like?
My guess is that it would look like the distribution of the demand on resources. So something like what we have today, just with more automation since everyone also is competent at automating things.
But the outcome tends to "all pop songs now rely on AutoTune". Everyone migrates to the same tool. And everything becomes grey and tasteless ;)
I could never do that because I just don't care about other humans like that. She had a different type of intelligence to me. She wasn't better than me, we were different, but it was a fundamental difference that could not be learned.
> I could never do that because I just don't care about other humans like that. She had a different type of intelligence to me. She wasn't better than me, we were different, but it was a fundamental difference that could not be learned.
A beautiful thing about us humans is that we are more similar than different in many ways, but our interests, tendencies and experiences draw us to certain individual behaviors, so we develop diverse skills, knowledge and temperaments. This duality is what I think makes us so powerful.
Perhaps there would still be wage differentiation, but dependent more on factors like degree of physical output necessary, risk of physical injury when performing the job, etc.
[1] https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com
That's said, if we have ample supply of any given commodity/occupation, then the market will greatly shaped by what the demands look like.
If a factory needs 200 droids then 10% of droid generated profit goes to the real human associated with that droid.
If a lawyer office needs 200 processes running AI agents searching through common law cases then 200 ppl would have to receive a fee for AI agents' use.
You can extrapolate to anything you want but basically the idea that very few humans actually need to work but that all 'work' must be regulated and associated to a real human with a real fiscal entity, not simply a thread or a company asset in the case of a physical robot.
In this scenario the question of a single uber human, master of all trades, no longer makes sense.
Not all automayed jobs are alike, and you can still make money through other non automated means, including entrepeneurship, but this restriction could probably enable UBI.
I guess humans would be like general purpose computers that you can program to do anything (let's assume all of the computers are equally specced). You said "entertainer", so it makes me wonder if people will still be wowed by acting or singing performances if they could also do it as competently. Would humans have to be like Borg units in this scenario?
But to return to the labor market, I guess no one get's paid 6 figures because they're "one of the few" that can architect the JSON for a webapp for some food delivery service, everyone can do that! People would still buy food because maybe not everyone wants to be a farmer, and people would still buy plane tickets because there are not enough resources to build everyone a plane (or an operating room).
After watching this (long) documentary about status anxiety[1] (or shorter summary: [2]) I like to see things from that perspective. Would the labor market have financial advisors if we're all competent at managing our wealth, would we even be chasing wealth (which we mostly do because IMO it's a status symbol) if we're all equal?
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t1MqJPHxy6g
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iipn6yM43sM
If you were to say, "I'll let you out of this concentration camp if a week from now you become a top-1% waiter, a top-1% bus-boy, a top-1% heavy thing mover", etc then at least half of all (healthy) people could do it.
As a result the work is commoditized, doesn't pay much, and doesn't come with much social respect.
Employers hire agencies to hire laborers to fill quotas. They don't much care whom they're hiring as long as they show up on time, sober, and don't cause trouble while working. The employee's thoughts on process optimization are to be kept to themselves.
Find other fields where those wants can be better met by a deafblind person.
Help her reframe her initial idea into one of these field.
Some things are just due to luck. That luck would compound over the years, like it already does. All the skill in the world will do you no good if you don't have the resources to capitalize on it.
We would also begin to discriminate on things other than pure skill. Since skill is flat, you could hire based on hair length, whether you like the person, etc.
There are a tiny number of jobs that require a special physical skills (steady handed surgeons). But they're rare. And a certain number of people couldn't do certain tasks physically or physiologically (most people could learn to dissect a body correctly, some people would never stop vomiting).
For example, during peak covid there was actually a shortage of certain health care workers because they were all either sick or already overworked.
Here in this hypothetical world could transform some people instantly into health care workers.
Also obsolete workers could be instantly retrained and put back to good use in society.
I wouldn’t mind a switch that could allow to immediately speak Spanish and Mandarin fluently.
For example, many people are able to work in a kitchen at the same level of a cook helper or a cook.
Having a balance lifestyle is very good for mental health and general happiness. Many hobbies work like that.
Imagine working 30 hours a week as software engineer and 10 doing gardening when it's sunny, or some light carpentry, or teaching.
Additionally, a lot of people switch careers and cross-pollinating knowledge from one job into another one can be effective and rewarding.
What if we lived and worked to better ourselves instead of just paying the bills?
However nobody would like to pay more than they charge for their own jobs, since they're compentent in that other task too. That would lead to people spending more time with tasks they don't like because they are more expense to hire someone to do it. Sad world.
To fix that, since everybody is competent in everything, they could organize themselves to rotate the jobs. Each person would be responsible for that job for a period of time, then they'd rotate. That could work with highly regulated jobs (like medicine or politics) but wouldn't work for others (like software development, gardening, etc). That would force a lot of energy to be spent in regulation. Less freedom. Sad world.
Finally, it doesn't matter if we're leveling people's competency by the highest or lowest level of competency available in any field, if they are always the same, that means there is no growth and there would be less networking and connection among people. A sad world.
On the other hand if they started at the same level of competency but could actually become more competent by exercising some job, than we'd create a difference. Given the time and the compounding effect, these differences would grow, causing people to look each other with respect and setting targets for themselves to reach higher levels of competency in a particular field.
The differences is what makes us special. They lead to growth. We should respect all the differences.