I think the mistake a lot of people make is assuming that their job is actually important. We got a little sneak preview of that during the lock downs in the la

I think the mistake a lot of people make is assuming that their job is actually important. We got a little sneak preview of that during the lock downs in the last two years when people's daily routines got disrupted a lot and a lot of day to day work either stopped happening or was reduced by a lot. It had a lot less effect than you would expect if you assume that most people do something important/essential. Most of what people do in their jobs isn't all that important. This is a result of automation that has gradually been introduced since the industrial revolution. People kept on working but the nature of what they do has become increasingly detached from things that people back in the day would have recognized as work or important. We work less than ever and lot of "work" basically involves people having meetings, managing other people, or doing things in the services industry in a complex network of interdependent tasks and processes where you might question what it actually is that we are actually doing collectively or why. Obviously, there is some value in doing these things because we're obviously doing them and getting something out of the process of doing that. At least subjectively. But what matters economically is that money changes hands and is used to create the demand for all these things. Without demand, there's no need to do a lot of the things that we do. And without that, the need to automate it also goes away. So there's this paradox that automating what we do, removes the demand for the thing (or at least downgrades its value). And it helps create demand for more valuable things we can do. Take bread for example. Rather crucial to a lot of people and it used to be the main component of a lot of people's diets. Bread now comes from factories and ever since we invented sliced bread it's been considered the best thing ever. Sliced bread (sliced by a machine) from a factory that produces bread at an industrial scale. Except we pay extra for artisanal bread that is made the old fashioned way. So we now have people with college degrees opening bakeries and selling us really expensive baked goods that they made with their own hands. Could what they do be automated? Yes, that already happened. But the whole point of what they do and why it is valuable is that it isn't. The factory bread is low value. And the bread is just part of the experience. The whole bread experience involves interacting with the amazing people that bake the bread, that knead the dough, and visiting the beautiful shops in which they do that. Add premium packaging to the mix and it makes you feel really good about spending 10$ on a loaf of bread. Can AI automate that experience. No. It might bake some bread but it won't be worth 10$. There's going to be a lot of that. People will look for activities that are valuable to others in some way. The automated stuff is inherently lower value, boring, and a commodity. And we need value creation to create demand for whatever else it is that we do for each other.