Ask HN: Can you imagine a world where anybody could do any job?
Imagine everybody would be competent doctor and farmer and entertainer and so on : all competent.
What would the labor market look like?
I could never do that because I just don't care about other humans like that. She had a different type of intelligence to me. She wasn't better than me, we were different, but it was a fundamental difference that could not be learned.
> I could never do that because I just don't care about other humans like that. She had a different type of intelligence to me. She wasn't better than me, we were different, but it was a fundamental difference that could not be learned.
A beautiful thing about us humans is that we are more similar than different in many ways, but our interests, tendencies and experiences draw us to certain individual behaviors, so we develop diverse skills, knowledge and temperaments. This duality is what I think makes us so powerful.
Perhaps there would still be wage differentiation, but dependent more on factors like degree of physical output necessary, risk of physical injury when performing the job, etc.
So we're pretending we're living in a world like it's that one Matrix scene where Trinity instantly learns to fly a helicopter?
> What would the labor market look like?
My guess is that it would look like the distribution of the demand on resources. So something like what we have today, just with more automation since everyone also is competent at automating things.
Inequality in society starts at very young ages. Age 6 at the latest. Most likely even age 2-3.
The thing about school is 'no child left behind' means education teaches to such a low and slow level that the dumbest of kids can pass. The majority of kids in the bell curve even find school to be idiotically low tier. That's the best our school system can do is teach to the lowest tier kid and get that dumb kid to 51%.
However, the kids who take it upon themselves to go above and beyond. Read more, do their homework, have good social skills, etc. They move to the top of the class without much effort.
The dumb kid who has 50 absent days in school and only gets 51% and moved onto the next grade is NOT equal to the kid who goes to school every day, gets their homework done and makes the effort to understand the subjects. Who then goes on to become something successful in life.
There will always be inequality until there's some serious big changes to education but that wont happen.
Economist Keynes predicted 15 hour work weeks: https://www.npr.org/2015/08/13/432122637/keynes-predicted-we...
He wasn't wrong, but he was wrong. So what gives? It's because people aren't equal. If you analyze how much bullshit jobs exist to fill nothing productivity and were to appropriately hand out workload equally. People should right today be able to work 10-20 hour weeks for the same wages.
Very important to society as well is to reward being better, to incentivize being better. The radiologist gets to drive the Tesla Model S plaid edition. The mcjob 51%er gets the $5000 piece of shit car nobody else wants.
If a factory needs 200 droids then 10% of droid generated profit goes to the real human associated with that droid.
If a lawyer office needs 200 processes running AI agents searching through common law cases then 200 ppl would have to receive a fee for AI agents' use.
You can extrapolate to anything you want but basically the idea that very few humans actually need to work but that all 'work' must be regulated and associated to a real human with a real fiscal entity, not simply a thread or a company asset in the case of a physical robot.
In this scenario the question of a single uber human, master of all trades, no longer makes sense.
Not all automayed jobs are alike, and you can still make money through other non automated means, including entrepeneurship, but this restriction could probably enable UBI.
If you were to say, "I'll let you out of this concentration camp if a week from now you become a top-1% waiter, a top-1% bus-boy, a top-1% heavy thing mover", etc then at least half of all (healthy) people could do it.
As a result the work is commoditized, doesn't pay much, and doesn't come with much social respect.
Employers hire agencies to hire laborers to fill quotas. They don't much care whom they're hiring as long as they show up on time, sober, and don't cause trouble while working. The employee's thoughts on process optimization are to be kept to themselves.
But the outcome tends to "all pop songs now rely on AutoTune". Everyone migrates to the same tool. And everything becomes grey and tasteless ;)
For example, during peak covid there was actually a shortage of certain health care workers because they were all either sick or already overworked.
Here in this hypothetical world could transform some people instantly into health care workers.
Also obsolete workers could be instantly retrained and put back to good use in society.
I wouldn’t mind a switch that could allow to immediately speak Spanish and Mandarin fluently.
I guess humans would be like general purpose computers that you can program to do anything (let's assume all of the computers are equally specced). You said "entertainer", so it makes me wonder if people will still be wowed by acting or singing performances if they could also do it as competently. Would humans have to be like Borg units in this scenario?
But to return to the labor market, I guess no one get's paid 6 figures because they're "one of the few" that can architect the JSON for a webapp for some food delivery service, everyone can do that! People would still buy food because maybe not everyone wants to be a farmer, and people would still buy plane tickets because there are not enough resources to build everyone a plane (or an operating room).
After watching this (long) documentary about status anxiety[1] (or shorter summary: [2]) I like to see things from that perspective. Would the labor market have financial advisors if we're all competent at managing our wealth, would we even be chasing wealth (which we mostly do because IMO it's a status symbol) if we're all equal?
However nobody would like to pay more than they charge for their own jobs, since they're compentent in that other task too. That would lead to people spending more time with tasks they don't like because they are more expense to hire someone to do it. Sad world.
To fix that, since everybody is competent in everything, they could organize themselves to rotate the jobs. Each person would be responsible for that job for a period of time, then they'd rotate. That could work with highly regulated jobs (like medicine or politics) but wouldn't work for others (like software development, gardening, etc). That would force a lot of energy to be spent in regulation. Less freedom. Sad world.
Finally, it doesn't matter if we're leveling people's competency by the highest or lowest level of competency available in any field, if they are always the same, that means there is no growth and there would be less networking and connection among people. A sad world.
On the other hand if they started at the same level of competency but could actually become more competent by exercising some job, than we'd create a difference. Given the time and the compounding effect, these differences would grow, causing people to look each other with respect and setting targets for themselves to reach higher levels of competency in a particular field.
The differences is what makes us special. They lead to growth. We should respect all the differences.
Some things are just due to luck. That luck would compound over the years, like it already does. All the skill in the world will do you no good if you don't have the resources to capitalize on it.
We would also begin to discriminate on things other than pure skill. Since skill is flat, you could hire based on hair length, whether you like the person, etc.
That's said, if we have ample supply of any given commodity/occupation, then the market will greatly shaped by what the demands look like.
Those professions all employ some kind of limiting function to ensure that most people aren't welcomed into the inner circle, however. Physicians have to luck into finding another physician willing to let them shadow them in order to become licensed. Farmers have to luck into having family already in the business willing to pass it down. Entertainers have to luck into the industry big wigs accepting their, um, favours.
You could be the most competent doctor/farmer/entertainer on earth, but if you don't luck into the right circumstances, you're not going to be able to practice it. That wouldn't go away in a world where everyone is equally competent.
For example, many people are able to work in a kitchen at the same level of a cook helper or a cook.
Having a balance lifestyle is very good for mental health and general happiness. Many hobbies work like that.
Imagine working 30 hours a week as software engineer and 10 doing gardening when it's sunny, or some light carpentry, or teaching.
Additionally, a lot of people switch careers and cross-pollinating knowledge from one job into another one can be effective and rewarding.
What if we lived and worked to better ourselves instead of just paying the bills?
Find other fields where those wants can be better met by a deafblind person.
Help her reframe her initial idea into one of these field.
There are a tiny number of jobs that require a special physical skills (steady handed surgeons). But they're rare. And a certain number of people couldn't do certain tasks physically or physiologically (most people could learn to dissect a body correctly, some people would never stop vomiting).