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If the model is right, the durable jobs of the future won’t be about monitoring AI systems or prompt engineering. Those are transitional roles in the automated sector. The durable jobs will be in the relational sector, where the human element is the product itself.
Some already exist and are growing: nurses, therapists, teachers, boutique fitness instructors, personal chefs, bespoke tailors, craft brewers, live performers, spiritual guides, childcare workers, and many varieties of hospitality and care work…

…Many haven’t been invented yet, just as six out of ten jobs people hold today didn’t exist in 1940.

So this is shaping up to be the new AI

sales pitch

. In the short term, AI will give people more work to do, and in the long term we’ll still get paid just to be human to each other. And our real wages will go up and up, because of the abundance AI creates.

I want to make a specific and narrow distinction between a hard company and a grindslop company. Because from the outside, it's easy to think these two things are the same. They both involve long hours. They both involve sacrifice. They both involve pushing people far past the point of comfort. But the difference is what the hours are for. In a hard company, the hours serve an output. The hours are the cost of the thing being built and no one is documenting the cost because the cost is not the product. In a grindslop company, the hours are the output. The documentation of those hours and the performance of suffering is the product. The suffering is the thing being built and the company is, in some very real sense, a machine for converting human effort into the feeling of exerting human effort.

The grindslop economy is not pointed towards anything beyond itself. It is pointed simply at the worship of itself.

If you live in a meritocratic society, you have to believe that every dollar is a direct and fair contribution returned to you by the rational market. If you're all squared up and you earned every dollar there's nothing left to give.
And you have to perform that earning continuously to provide proof that you suffered, proof that the return was proportional, proof that you don't owe anything to anyone or that the market was unfair in any way. Look how much I suffer. Look how much I hurt.

Great work has always demanded sacrifice and often brutal hours and I'm not disputing this. What I'm disputing is the direction. These people, many of them friends, have more economic freedom than any class in history and they've chosen, freely, to simulate the conditions of a Chinese assembly line and call it virtue.

All people are equally good at time management, but some people are more willing than others to admit that they are doing what they want to do, while others maintain the illusion they wish they were doing something else.