The Grand Illusion
In an article published in The New York Times, on May 7, 2026, dealing with possible causes of the declining birthrate in the United States, the economist Claudia Goldin cited two factors: (1) the unpredictable shifts and low wages that have barely kept pace with the cost of living for less-skilled workers and (2) so-called “greedy jobs,” positions that demand far more of an employee than can be accomplished within “normal working hours.”
In fact, today most U.S. workers face three possibilities for work: no available jobs, jobs with wages/hours insufficient to pay the bills, or “greedy jobs.”
I’m more than a little acquainted with “greedy jobs,” since every political or consulting job I had for the eighteen years I worked in Washington, D.C., took far more time than nine to five and had requirements that went far beyond the job description.
Sometimes, financial circumstances also create “greedy jobs,” particularly the costs of higher education. A junior degreed professional – doctor, engineer, lawyer, dentist, and others – who leaves graduate school with a high level of student loans may well find his or her job barely able to provide a living wage after making student loan payments while another junior degreed professional whose family supported them through college and graduate school won’t have near the financial problems.
As for tenure track/tenured university professors, whether a position is “greedy” depends on the university and the field. At least at my wife’s university, the pay is higher in certain areas, such as business, and the hours are shorter. In the performing arts, especially in music, the pay is lower, the hours longer, and on average, music professors work six-day weeks. And to add to that, the administrative and paperwork requirements have effectively doubled over the past decade as a result of politically required documentation. As a result, many senior professors are retiring earlier, and taking lower retirement benefits, and they’re being replaced by much younger and fewer professors and more low-paid part-time adjuncts without benefits, especially health benefits, creating “greedier” full-time positions and more underpaid and insecure part-time positions.
But very few analysts – or politicians – seem to realize that current economic pressures are turning more, if not most, available jobs into either those that can’t pay the bills or barely do and those that are “greedy jobs.”
Is this really the future we want?
If all of the thinking jobs are taken by AI, and all of the weight-bearing jobs by robots, then we could soon either be in a classic SF ‘utopia’ (eg the Culture) in which humans concentrate on art and leisure, or a classic dystopia, where all of the value accrues to a few individuals who live in sealed communities and only travel outside them in armored convoys (eg pretty much anything by Heinlein). I wonder which one of these we’re heading towards?
Or events rather like the French Revolution.
Your utopia, my nightmare.
If everybody is privileged and nobody needs to do anything unless they want to, it would be a service to the universe for the sun to expand early and wipe them (us) all out.
Necessity is necessary to keep us from turning into useless jelly. That also requires winners, losers, maybe even some unfairness, because too much fairness would be like assured outcomes, another jelly-maker.
Darwin dealing death improves the species more than AI and robots.
Wow, glad somebody showed you some mercy in the crib
hence the quote marks around ‘utopia’. The Culture novels wouldn’t have much plot if everything was just lovely
The only constructive form of capitalism is regulated capitalism, unless anyone wants robber-baron overlords. And it can’t be self-regulated, since that’s self-defeating; “who shall watch the watchers?”
People are not being replaced by AI. Companies are spending a lot of money on AI and have to cut spending elsewhere. So, the companies are cutting jobs. They are doing this in response to directions from their boards. I am guessing this is because of interlocking boards and large investments by the board members in AI companies.
The studies are showing that AI is not good enough to really replace someone. They are doing interesting things but they aren’t succeeding at real work. The costs are going up and the results aren’t there.
The push is another way for the oligarchs to gain control even if it is by illusion.
Sadly, poor outcomes from AI replacement won’t stop it happening. The suppliers will just extract extra fees for ‘fixing’ the problem. The modern equivalent of management consultants
More on this from Kenneth Rogoff for Project Syndicate: Will the AI economy create a permanent underclass? https://www.theguardian.com/business/2026/jun/02/will-the-ai-economy-create-a-permanent-underclass
I haven’t read the original NYT times article, but if the summary here is on point, I do have some concerns. Declining birthrate’s in developing countries is far from new – Demographic Transition was a high school topic for me in the early 80’s, when the top end PC was an IBM AT and AI wasn’t even a glimmer on the horizon. I can accept that AI and current job trends may impact the birthrate, but other factors that have been around for decades would seem to be more relevant. Basically – as individuals, we don’t need to have as many children as we once did, so we don’t have them.
Maybe it’s just that young people look around and see a world they just imagine wanting to raise a family in…
… can’t imagine…