> Graeber lists a few of these bogus occupations[1]: tax lawyers, marketing consultants, actuaries, HR consultants, financial strategists, etc.
jeez, i was thinking cart returner, cashier, some landscaping jobs, ...
Jobs that either could be easily replaced by tech(cashier, waitress),
easily replaced by the customer themselves(shelf stockers vs costco style pallets, cart returner vs aldi style coin system),
or things that society deems desirable but are not realistically valuable (landscaping is sometimes useless, but society sees it as valuable)
actuary has 100% value, we NEED to know the percent chance of something happening, so we can account for billing(if not used for profit mongering, its still required to run an altruistic insurance). I'd say actuary, whether for insurance company or for studies, is a necessary job forever. (not accounting for AI)
What you named are NOT BS jobs. A BS job is one that, if it disappeared tomorrow, no one would even notice (or things would become _more_ efficient). Your examples would result in carts piling up in parking lots, people with $500 of groceries clogging up self-checkout lines for hours (plus a whole lot of theft) and public spaces looking like hell.
I think the stronger version of this argument is that if we did things Costco style then we'd have more metaphorical Costcos, including the distribution and number of positions within a Costco. Even with pallets, does Costco still have people managing the shelves? Probably. But also probably far less. Are we okay with that?
We are probably heading towards a world where unexpected slices of labor here and there are about to be automated away. Which ones exactly? I don't think that's the right question. Also, early automation is unlikely to categorically wipe out positions. Instead we'll just see fewer positions. Are we okay with that?
Another perspective of the same problem is you're doing a startup. You don't hire DevOps for a whole year and instead rely on sst.dev or Cloudflare hosting. Are we okay with that?
I think even your list isn't bullshit jobs. The world needs cart returners, landscapers, etc. And replacing jobs with the customers doing the job doesn't seem particularly desirable either (and proves those job aren't bullshit).
There are people with real bullshit jobs; you can find people describe them online. Where they are employed, they actually do work, but they know that work doesn't contribute anything. They are usually depressed about it.
I have a job where I do actual work. I have clients who require my assistance to perform their jobs effectively. However, the jobs _they_ are doing fundamentally do not add value to the world. In turn, that means my job adds nothing of value to the world. Yes, I am on anti-depressant medications primarily because I am wasting my time on this planet performing a bullshit job.
I’ve consistently found that a good delineator is “does the job require non-trivial decision making, or are you just a robot following highly specified algorithm?”
jeez, i was thinking cart returner, cashier, some landscaping jobs, ...
Jobs that either could be easily replaced by tech(cashier, waitress),
easily replaced by the customer themselves(shelf stockers vs costco style pallets, cart returner vs aldi style coin system),
or things that society deems desirable but are not realistically valuable (landscaping is sometimes useless, but society sees it as valuable)
actuary has 100% value, we NEED to know the percent chance of something happening, so we can account for billing(if not used for profit mongering, its still required to run an altruistic insurance). I'd say actuary, whether for insurance company or for studies, is a necessary job forever. (not accounting for AI)