AI Is Coming For Fiat-Powered Bullshit Jobs

AI is coming for bullshit jobs. And that's great because fiat money has created a lot of bullshit.

By "bullshit job" I mean jobs that would not exist in a competitive market. These jobs exist mainly because of distortions created by easy money policies, regulatory bloat & the wealth of Western societies, which enables a lot of people to get paid for activities that contribute no value to society.

Note: I do not mean to denigrate people who hold these jobs, or to imply that their jobs are easier than any other. It is the system that is broken, not (necessarily) the people keeping it going.

For example, there are about 350 thousand medical coders in the US processing your insurance paperwork. Up to the mid-20th century, before healthcare became highly regulated, doctors did their own billing. Today, filling ICD-compliant billing is a vast expertise of its own.

Here is a partial list of "bullshit jobs" that would not exist at all, or be drastically smaller in a free market:

* Medical billing and coding specialists
* Financial advisors (99% of people would keep savings, not 401K in a free market)
* Human resource specialists - most of their work is dealing with benefits admin created due to tax policy
* College & primary school administrators - schools & universities used to work fine with 1/10th as many
* College professors (I have nothing against them, but 95% of college students should be going to trade school)
* PhD researchers -- most academic papers are read by no one and contribute nothing useful to society
* Compliance officers
* Data protection officers
* Regulatory affairs specialists
* Grants management specialists
* Government affairs liaisons
* Corporate social responsibility officers
* Sustainability coordinators
* License processors
* Customer service representatives handling bureaucratic issues
* All the bullshit-by-proxy jobs, like software developers writing bullshit processing software, finance writers writing for investors whose money should be in savings accounts, etc.

These bullshit jobs have several causes, but mostly they are a result of seignorage, that is, the Federal Reserve printing new money and distributing it unevenly throughout the economy. As a result, vast sections of the US economy face far less competitive pressure than they would in a free market, enabling useless jobs to accumulate. In a poorer country, there simply isn't enough wealth to pay so many people for work that does nothing to maintain the standard of living. Furthermore, the Fed's artificially low-interest rates discount the value of low-risk current revenue in favor of high-risk future revenue, thus shifting the economy towards high-risk services and high-tech industries and away from traditional manufacturing-based industries.

Obviously, AI is not a magic wand. It does not make all the bullshit go away. But work that truly creates new value for the world is much more difficult to automate because (1) easy money from the Fed is not subsidizing it and (2) there is competitive pressure towards efficiencies.

In the short term, AI will be used to automate many of these fields. Longer term, the ability to create content such as infinite academic papers better than what is coming out of universities or create compelling self-educational experiences will make these jobs so obviously irrelevant that their number will shrink.