I’m not totally sure how I view the process of making money. Is it a right or a privilege? In the coming decades, I am sure we will re-evaluate what it means to make a living. With increasing automation and an ever-diminishing cost of energy, what are we working for? Do we work because it gives us meaning or because we need an income so that we can afford what we need? I think society today is divided. Over many decades, we have gone from being hard working - where our family was the only safety net we had - to a society where government support has become the norm. If we look at countries where they have a growing population of unemployed young people, like Spain and China, we also see a growing demand for government programs to take care of these young people. Help is no longer seen as a lifeline that will save you until you get a job (when there are no jobs to be had). A government handout is increasingly being seen as a natural necessity by the younger generation. 

What a salary was

200 years ago, the energy that went into a human body in form of food became the energy that ploughed the field to grow crops. It was hard work from sunrise to sunset. If the farmer was skilled and lucky he made the energy back with next years crops. Back then you didn’t have a salary, you instead measured your income by how much food (energy) you had to make sure you could feed your family. My point is that we could measure the farmer’s income in energy, not money. As technology has developed, we have been able to get more and more out of every worker and every hour. 15 hours of manual labour in the field has decreased as we got tractors and better tools to help us. 15-hour work days in a field decreased to 8 hours in an office, in many cases even less. 

What a salary has become

How is it possible to get more out of every human with less time? The answer is to add more energy per man hour - to get leverage. The farmer used horses to get the leverage, the more horses he had, the heavier the plough he could use and the faster his work would be. The equivalent today would be a self-employed person who has four personal assistants instead of horses. That self-employed person is no longer producing 8 hours of work per 8 hours at his desk. He is producing 40 hours of work per day. This is leverage. In the near future, AI will take the role of personal assistants, and when you can have as many assistants (or workers) as you want for nearly no cost, productivity will go through the roof and the human’s role will become ever smaller. The old equation that  Manual Labour x Time = Output has changed. We are now living in a society where we are moving towards Time x Energy = Output. Manual labour is getting phased out of the equation. It’s still happening rather slowly but things might change faster than we as a society can handle.  

The higher output we are getting today is the derivate of cheap energy. Everything we can do with excess power makes our lives better and increases output (grows GDP). It is getting cheaper and cheaper to replace humans with robots. In the car industry this has been happening for decades. The cost to automate what can be automated in a car factory for instance will be worth it in the long run: it’s going to be cheaper to produce the cars, workers will get better working conditions and the cars will get cheaper. 

If a machine can perform the same amount of labour for a precipitously lower price, then workers will become too expensive in comparison. In many cases they already are. 

It is important to highlight that even though automating a factory might make some workers obsolete, unemployment rates are historically low right now, even when compared to data spanning over decades. When automating, people will find opportunities in new fields.

What a salary will be

If there is no reason to have workers, governments will have to rase taxes on the companies that do not hire manual labour, just to get the taxes to pay everyone who will be unemployed. 

It’s strange thinking about it, but if companies were taxed up to the level of what they would pay if they had workers, but had greater productivity as a result of automation, there would be no more manual labour and everyone could get their income as a form of universal income. Higher productivity and a great income for everyone means better living conditions - for everyone. This concept has been talked about in theory for many decades, but the technology is here now. There will not be another 100 years of manual labour, probably not even 50. If we don’t want to continue working of course. Herein lies the problem. 

Even if academics will discuss the positives and negatives of universal income and realise that it’s not a matter of “if” but “when”, I don’t think they will say the same thing about their own jobs, even though the people at the top, politicians, think tanks, corporate leaders etc, might be the first people we actually can replace with something far mor efficient. Chat GPT is in its infancy, now it’s being merged with Windows. Every computer software will soon have an assistant that will take care of your every need. There is no doubt that the evolution of AI is going to amaze and frighten people who haven’t looked into what happens if you get exponential growth of an intelligence. AI is going to replace humans faster than regulators will be able to regulate. But the people at the top will do their best to keep their jobs, holding on for dear life by regulating against AI. The future will come, and we will have to choose to go along with ever increased productivity and living standards for all, or we can work against it and keep our jobs. What will we choose? 

What you can do to secure your future

What does that mean for you? Well, for starters it means that if you are in the beginning of your career and have a job where you use your brain you will probably need to retire a bit earlier than you thought. If you want job security, you should look into working with your hands. I believe that the last jobs to disappear will be the carpenters, painters, bricklayers etc, but even these will disappear one day. The only exception I can think of would-be artists. Even though AI can create amazing art, people will always pay for the real deal. 

Over the next year or two, you will have to re-learn and start to work with an AI-assistant. In 10 years, most of these jobs will be done by computer. In 20 years’ time I think we will see a very different job market for lawyers, bankers and professors and professions in general. If you want to make sure that you are still employable in the future, you will have to be able learn and re-learn. If you have a job in the future, you will be working with AI and the quality of the instructions you give it will be what sets you apart from other people in your field.