Here’s a startling fact: Intelligent, highly qualified people who do difficult knowledge work are a few minutes of training away from taking the job of most other knowledge workers. This means that when AI displaces them, they push the entire job market down. Here’s how that works.

If we can just get over our emotions for one second, what makes you believe that you can’t run a post office tomorrow? Do you know how little knowledge and brainpower is required to do that? I don’t know what post office directors do, but I bet you that the worst Google engineer can pick it up in a few hours.

This may or may not be true of post office directors specifically. That’s not an attack on them. I don’t know the first things about post officing. Sometimes I get mad at them because they deliver my amazon prime package in 3 days instead of two (I’m currently in Portugal, so it’s not really Prime).

But I’m sure that in their mind, doing this job is tricky because of the many things that they have to know. There are perhaps a hundred, five hundred, or maybe even ten thousand rules, regulations, guidelines, best practices, conventions, and idiosyncrasies that they have to keep in mind. There are probably a lot of things that don’t go by the book but are required to make things work. I have respect for that. But I still maintain that a decent engineer can get the gist of it in a day. They’ll probably get a lot of things wrong in their first few weeks. Who wouldn’t? After that, they’ll be indiscernible from all the other post office workers who have been there for decades. because post officing doesn’t benefit much from experience the same way doctoring does.

There’s no amount of training that you can cram in a year’s time to make you even close to an entry-level position at Google, even if you’re pretty clever.

Am I the only one that finds this interesting? It’s spooky. Why does the Google engineer start at 4 times the comp of a post office clerk? One of the reasons is that they can become a post office clerk tomorrow if they chose to. The post office worker can’t become a Google engineer, a knife-maker, a glass blower, or even a good prostitute. That’s what scares me most about this AI thing.

When big tech fired all those workers around the start of 2023, guess what that does to the job market? Do you think they get added to the queue like everyone? No. They start at the top of the queue, like a hot girl in a nightclub. They don’t even know what people are queuing for.

Likewise, when AI takes a Google engineer’s job, that engineer reinters the workforce at the top, thus pushing everyone down a notch. The Senior Engineer is pushed down to Junior, and the Junior now runs the post office (better than the previous officer I gotta say). This is for the simple reason that everyone who owns a post office in a free market prefers to have an engineer run it rather than someone who’s trained in the art of post officing.

So when this happens, where do all these people go? In the previous mass job displacements, there was always a place for Bob and Billy, Jill and Janette because there was space to move down the value-added chain (plow a field) or to train and move up (work at Deloitte doing useless things). But in the current situation, I don’t know that there is either.

People talk about the value of art, but I’m highly doubtful of that. For its entire history, art was very centralized because the artistic senses of the masses are determined by very few people. The only way out of this that I can think of is if service becomes more valuable. Is it true that in a world of automation, Dave would rather take Dona to a restaurant with human beings as servers instead of robots? Is it true that Tim wants to speak to a human customer service specialist rather than a more helpful and more pleasant bot?

But if that’s the case, doesn’t this look like the beginning of a new type of feudalism where society is divided across an IQ Chasm instead of land ownership? Doesn’t this divide society into service people and those who are served? But how is this any different from how we currently live? Is AI a Zebra?