The "legitimate work" problem in the context of the AI Era is a symptom of interlocking post-industrial forces, ref https://substack.com/home/post/p-199640284. That's a hard problem.
The ladder problem is easier only if the new ladders reproduce the legitimacy function of the old ones, not just the competence function. AI can create new tasks and new paths to expertise. The harder question is whether those paths generate the kind of recognized contribution through which people claim standing inside an institution. Spec-making at the frontier does.
The question is what happens to the 80 percent of people who don't reach the frontier not whether they're employed, but whether the system still has a grammar for explaining why they belong. That's not a ladder problem. That's a claim problem. And it doesn't resolve automatically when new tasks appear.
The frame for the claim problem (why they belong) is based on continuation of the trend of post-industrial-era make-work jobs. Aka bullshit jobs become a bigger fraction.
The post-industrial passivation of people is already reducing participation and TFR.
That's why I posit that the switch to an activating civilization is a crucial step. And that either we switch into a "builder" era where the passivating forces are reversed or we miss another opportunity to get out of pist-industrial civilizational decline, that takes us into an AI-intensified "Synthetic Civilization".
The "legitimate work" problem in the context of the AI Era is a symptom of interlocking post-industrial forces, ref https://substack.com/home/post/p-199640284. That's a hard problem.
The ladder problem is easier. Painful, but not hard to solve, because AI provides ladders too. Ref https://decisionanalytics.substack.com/p/ai-will-not-create-a-civilization and https://ssrn.com/abstract=6482860.
The ladder problem is easier only if the new ladders reproduce the legitimacy function of the old ones, not just the competence function. AI can create new tasks and new paths to expertise. The harder question is whether those paths generate the kind of recognized contribution through which people claim standing inside an institution. Spec-making at the frontier does.
The question is what happens to the 80 percent of people who don't reach the frontier not whether they're employed, but whether the system still has a grammar for explaining why they belong. That's not a ladder problem. That's a claim problem. And it doesn't resolve automatically when new tasks appear.
The frame for the claim problem (why they belong) is based on continuation of the trend of post-industrial-era make-work jobs. Aka bullshit jobs become a bigger fraction.
The post-industrial passivation of people is already reducing participation and TFR.
That's why I posit that the switch to an activating civilization is a crucial step. And that either we switch into a "builder" era where the passivating forces are reversed or we miss another opportunity to get out of pist-industrial civilizational decline, that takes us into an AI-intensified "Synthetic Civilization".