Tag: Humor

The Future of Bullshit Jobs

Many economists and philosophers are trying to figure out today about the future of work. What will people do once robots and autonomous systems can perform practically all tasks in the workplace better than human beings can?

Well, here’s a little well-known secret: many of us are already unemployed. Many, many more than governmental statistics indicate. We just haven’t realized it yet.

Why? Because plenty of people today are working in bullshit jobs, in the words of anthropologist David Graeber. Here’s what he has to say about bullshit jobs –

“…more and more employees find themselves… working 40 or even 50 hour weeks on paper, but effectively working 15 hours… since the rest of their time is spent organizing or attending motivational seminars, updating their facebook profiles or downloading TV box-sets.”

Think of your own job. If you work at a desk or at an office, some of your days probably look approximately like this:

  1. You come into the office in the morning.
  2. You chat with your co-workers for 15 minutes.
  3. You open your computer and chat with your friends on Facebook for another hour.
  4. You feel compelled to do some work. You open a document you began work on yesterday, work on it for ten minutes, then excuse yourself to check your e-mails, then your facebook again, then read answers on Quora (try my content for more future-related answers!), then play just one game of Solitaire…
  5. …and two hours later, you return to reality and realize you haven’t done any significant work today. You resolve to work harder, immediately after lunch.
  6. Lunch takes an hour.
  7. And then you’re drowsy for yet another hour. Luckily, that’s the time for the weekly departmental motivational seminar, during which you can safely sleep while nodding your head vigorously at the same time and grunting affirmatively.
  8. Finally, you realize with a shuddder that it’s almost the end of the workday. You feel guilty and ashamed, and so, in a concentrated effort of 1–2 hours, you actually SIT DOWN AND WORK.

And the amazing thing is that in those 1–2 hours of work, you actually complete an amount of work that used to require an entire office of secretaries to perform a few decades ago. That’s because you’re using smart and automated tools like Microsoft Office Word, Excel and Powerpoint. These tools increase productivity, so that a single person who is proficient in using them can do more in a shorter period of time.

So why do so many of us still work for eight hours a day? Why do so many people work at jobs that they know are ineffective, and in which they waste their time?

Simply put, because human beings need the illusion of being useful, or at least of doing something with their lives. They need to preserve a veneer of action – even though much of that action throughout the workday is almost entirely fictional.

Now, obviously, many of us do not work at a bullshit job… yet. But bullshit jobs form when productivity increases dramatically, which basically describes any form of work in which automation is going to have an impact. And that means that many of our jobs will become much more… bullshitty… in the future.

So – what would happen when robots take over all of our jobs? My guess is that mankind would just inflate the old jobs so that the work that can be done in ten minutes, will still engage workers for a full day. In short, we’ll all ‘work’ at bullshit jobs.

Here, I made a diagram of what it’ll look like. And you know where I did it? That’s right – at work, while answering questions on Quora.

Enjoy the future / present!

——-

This post was originally written as an answer to a question at Quora.  You are welcome to browse my content there and enjoy more answers about the future.

Who’ll Win the Next War: the Tank or the Geek?

I was asked on Quora how the tanks of the future are going to be designed. Here’s my answer – I hope it’ll make you reflect once again on the future of war and what it entails.

And now, consider this: the Israeli Merkava Mark IV tank.

Merkava4_MichaelMass02.jpg
Merkava Mark IV. Source: Michael Mass, Yad La-Shiryon, found on Wikipedia

It is one of the most technologically advanced tanks in the world. It is armed with a massive 120 mm smoothbore gun that fires shells with immense explosive power, with two roof-mounted machine guns, and with a 60 mm mortar in case the soldiers inside really want to make a point. However, the tank has to be deployed on the field, and needs to reach its target. It also costs around $6 million.

Now consider this: the Israeli geek (picture taken from the Israeli reality show – Beauty and the Geek). The geek is the one on the left, in case you weren’t sure.

120101803_0937500_0..jpg
The common Israeli Geek. He’s the one on the left of the picture. Source: Israeli reality show – Beauty and the Geek.

With the click of a button and the aid of some hacking software available on the Darknet, our humble Israeli geek can paralyze whole institutions, governments and critical infrastructures. He can derail trains (happened in Poland), deactivate sewage pumps and mix contaminated water with drinking water (happened in Texas), or even cut the power supply to tens of thousands of people (happened in Ukraine). And if that isn’t bad enough, he could take control over the enemy female citizens’ wireless vibrators and operate it to his and/or their satisfaction (potentially happened already).

Oh, and the Israeli geek works for free. Why? Because he loves hacking stuff. Just make sure you cover the licensing costs for the software he’s using, or he might hack your vibrator next.

So, you asked – “how will futuristic tanks be designed”?

I answer, “who cares”?

 

But Seriously Now…

When you’re thinking of the future, you have to realize that some paradigms are going to change. One of those paradigms is that of physical warfare. You see, tanks were created to do battle in a physical age, in which they had an important role: to protect troops and provide overwhelming firepower while bringing those troops wherever they needed to be. That was essentially the German blizkrieg strategy.

In the digital age, however, everything is connected to the internet, or very soon will be. Not just every computer, but every bridge, every building, every power plant and energy grid, and every car. And as security futurist Marc Goodman noted in his book Future Crimes, “when everything is connected, everything is vulnerable”. Any piece of infrastructure that you connect to the internet, immediately becomes vulnerable to hacking.

Now, here’s a question for you: what is the purpose of war?

I’ll give you a hint: it’s not about driving tanks with roaring engines around. It’s not about soldiers running and shooting in the field. It’s not even about dropping bombs from airplanes. All of the above are just tools for achieving the real purpose: winning the war by either making the enemy surrender to you, or neutralizing it completely.

And how do you neutralize the enemy? It’s quite simple: you demolish the enemy’s factories; you destroy their cities; you ruin your enemy’s citizens morale to the point where they can’t fight you anymore.

In the physical age, armies clashed on the field because each army was on the way to the other side’s cities and territory. That’s why you needed fast tanks with awesome armanent and armor. But today, in the digital age, hackers can leap straight over the battlefield, and make war directly between cities in real-time. They can shut down hospitals and power plants, kill everyone with a heart pacemaker or an insulin pump, and make trains and cars collide with each other. In short, they could shut down entire cities.

So again – who needs tanks?

 

And Still…

I’m not saying there aren’t going to be tanks. The physical aspect of warfare still counts, and one can’t just disregard it. However, tanks simply don’t count as much in comparison to the cyber-security aspects of warfare (partly because tanks themselves are connected nowadays).

Again, that does not mean that tanks are useless. We still need to figure out the exact relationships between tanks and geeks, and precisely where, when and how needs to be deployed in the new digital age. But if you were to ask me in ten years what’s more important – the tank or the geek – then my bet would definitely be on the geek.

 

If this aspect of future warfare interests you, I invite you to read the two papers I’ve published in the European Journal of Futures Research and in Foresight, about future scenarios for crime and terror that rely on the internet of things.