Copywriting, tax preparation, customer service, and many other tasks are or will soon be heavily automated. I can see the beginnings in areas like software development and contract law. Generally, tasks that involve reading, analyzing, and synthesizing information, and then generating content based on it, seem ripe for replacement by language models.
Anyone who makes a living through delicate and varied movements guided by situation specific know-how can expect to work for much longer than five more years. Thus, electricians, gardeners, plumbers, jewelry makers, hair stylists, as well as those who repair ironwork or make stained glass might find their handiwork contributing to our society for many more years to come
Finally, I expect there to be jobs where humans are preferred to AIs even if the AIs can do the job equally well, or perhaps even if they can do it better. This will apply to jobs where something is gained from the very fact that a human is doing it—likely because it involves the consumer feeling like they have a relationship with the human worker as a human. Jobs that might fall into this category include counselors, doulas, caretakers for the elderly, babysitters, preschool teachers, priests and religious leaders, even sex workers—much has been made of AI girlfriends, but I still expect that a large percentage of buyers of in-person sexual services will have a strong preference for humans. Some have called these jobs “nostalgic jobs.”
It does seem that, overall, unemployment makes people sadder, sicker, and more anxious. But it isn’t clear if this is an inherent fact of unemployment, or a contingent one. It is difficult to isolate the pure psychological effects of being unemployed, because at present these are confounded with the financial effects—if you lose your job, you have less money—which produce stress that would not exist in the context of, say, universal basic income. It is also confounded with the “shame” aspect of being fired or laid off—of not working when you really feel you should be working—as opposed to the context where essentially all workers have been displaced.
One study that gets around the “shame” confounder of unemployment is “A Forced Vacation? The Stress of Being Temporarily Laid Off During a Pandemic” by Scott Schieman, Quan Mai, and Ryu Won Kang. This study looked at Canadian workers who were temporarily laid off several months into the COVID-19 pandemic. They first assumed that such a disruption would increase psychological distress, but instead found that the self-reported wellbeing was more in line with the “forced vacation hypothesis,” suggesting that temporarily laid-off workers might initially experience lower distress due to the unique circumstances of the pandemic.
By May 2020, the distress gap observed in April had vanished, indicating that being temporarily laid off was not associated with higher distress during these months. The interviews revealed that many workers viewed being left without work as a “forced vacation,” appreciating the break from work-related stress and valuing the time for self-care and family. The widespread nature of layoffs normalized the experience, reducing personal blame and fostering a sense of shared experience. Financial strain was mitigated by government support, personal savings, and reduced spending, which buffered against potential distress.
The study suggests that the context and available support systems can significantly alter the psychological outcomes of unemployment—which seems promising for AGI-induced unemployment.
From the studies on plant closures and pandemic layoffs, it seems that shame plays a role in making people unhappy after unemployment, which implies that they might be happier in full automation-induced unemployment, since it would be near-universal and not signify any personal failing.
A final piece that reveals a societal-psychological aspect to how much work is deemed necessary is that the amount has changed over time! The number of hours that people have worked has declined over the past 150 years. Work hours tend to decline as a country gets richer. It seems odd to assume that the current accepted amount of work of roughly 40 hours a week is the optimal amount. The 8-hour work day, weekends, time off—hard-fought and won by the labor movement!—seem to have been triumphs for human health and well-being. Why should we assume that stopping here is right? Why should we assume that less work was better in the past, but less work now would be worse?
Removing the shame that accompanies unemployment by removing the sense that one ought to be working seems one way to make people happier during unemployment. Another is what they do with their free time. Regardless of how one enters unemployment, one still confronts empty and often unstructured time.
One paper, titled “Having Too Little or Too Much Time Is Linked to Lower Subjective Well-Being” by Marissa A. Sharif, Cassie Mogilner, and Hal E. Hershfield tried to explore whether it was possible to have “too much” leisure time.
The paper concluded that it is possible to have too little discretionary time, but also possible to have too much, and that moderate amounts of discretionary time seemed best for subjective well-being. More time could be better, or at least not meaningfully worse, provided it was spent on “social” or “productive” leisure activities. This suggests that how people fare psychologically with their post-AGI unemployment will depend heavily on how they use their time, not how much of it there is
Automation-induced unemployment could feel like retiring depending on how total it is. If essentially no one is working, and no one feels like they should be working, it might be more akin to retirement, in that it would lack the shameful element of feeling set apart from one’s peers.
Women provide another view on whether formal work is good for happiness. Women are, for the most part, relatively recent entrants to the formal labor market. In the U.S., 18% of women were in the formal labor force in 1890. In 2016, 57% were. Has labor force participation made them happier? By some accounts: no. A paper that looked at subjective well-being for U.S. women from the General Social Survey between the 1970s and 2000s—a time when labor force participation was climbing—found both relative and absolute declines in female happiness.
I think women’s work and AI is a relatively optimistic story. Women have been able to automate unpleasant tasks via technological advances, while the more meaningful aspects of their work seem less likely to be automated away.
When not participating in the formal labor market, women overwhelmingly fill their time with childcare and housework. The time needed to do housework has declined over time due to tools like washing machines, dryers, and dishwashers. These tools might serve as early analogous examples of the future effects of AI: reducing unwanted and burdensome work to free up time for other tasks deemed more necessary or enjoyable.
it seems less likely that AIs will so thoroughly automate childcare and child-rearing because this “work” is so much more about the relationship between the parties involved. Like therapy, childcare and teaching seems likely to be one of the forms of work where a preference for a human worker will persist the longest.
In the early modern era, landed gentry and similar were essentially unemployed. Perhaps they did some minor administration of their tenants, some dabbled in politics or were dragged into military projects, but compared to most formal workers they seem to have worked relatively few hours. They filled the remainder of their time with intricate social rituals like balls and parties, hobbies like hunting, studying literature, and philosophy, producing and consuming art, writing letters, and spending time with friends and family. We don’t have much real well-being survey data from this group, but, hedonically, they seem to have been fine. Perhaps they suffered from some ennui, but if we were informed that the great mass of humanity was going to enter their position, I don’t think people would be particularly worried.
I sometimes wonder if there is some implicit classism in people’s worries about unemployment: the rich will know how to use their time well, but the poor will need to be kept busy.
Although a trained therapist might be able to counsel my friends or family through their troubles better, I still do it, because there is value in me being the one to do so. We can think of this as the relational reason for doing something others can do better. I write because sometimes I enjoy it, and sometimes I think it betters me. I know others do so better, but I don’t care—at least not all the time. The reasons for this are part hedonic and part virtue or morality.
A renowned AI researcher once told me that he is practicing for post-AGI by taking up activities that he is not particularly good at: jiu-jitsu, surfing, and so on, and savoring the doing even without excellence. This is how we can prepare for our future where we will have to do things from joy rather than need, where we will no longer be the best at them, but will still have to choose how to fill our days.
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