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The Weekend Essay

On the Disappearance of the Boring Job

Half a million people in Britain do work that, by next spring, a single GPU server can do better. The interesting question is not what happens to them. It is what happens to the rest of us when the bottom rung of the ladder is sawn off.

Helen Lewis The Atlantic 22 min
Photo: Stephen Voss for The Atlantic

There is a kind of work that has always been described, with a touch of apology, as "entry-level." The phrase carries an implicit promise — you do this for a year or two, and on the strength of having done it you are allowed to do something more interesting next.

That ladder is, quietly, being sawn off. Not at the top, where the discourse usually concentrates, but at the bottom, where most of the people are.

The estimate I trust is from the Resolution Foundation: roughly five hundred thousand UK roles whose entire work product can be done, today, by a single large model running on a single GPU server. Not "could be augmented." Done.

The interesting question is not, primarily, what happens to those five hundred thousand. The interesting question is what happens to the next intake of graduates and school-leavers when there is no longer a first job through which to learn the trade.

I do not have a clean answer. I have a suspicion, and the suspicion is that the bottom rung was never really the point. It was the place where the point was learned — the texture of an industry, the names of the people in it, the small humiliations of being new. If the GPU server takes the rung, the ladder is still standing, but the climb has been changed in a way we are only beginning to understand.

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