Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: The Overemployed Via ChatGPT, published by Zvi on April 18, 2023 on LessWrong.

Previously: Escape Velocity From Bullshit Jobs

They took our jobs! They took. several of our jobs?

“ChatGPT does like 80 percent of my job,” said one worker. Another is holding the line at four robot-performed jobs. “Five would be overkill,” he said.

The stories told in this Vice article (and elsewhere) are various people who found themselves able to do most job tasks much faster than they could previously do those same tasks. They use this to take on additional ‘full time’ jobs.

If the jobs involved are productive, this reflects large increases in total factor productivity that will continue to spread. That seems great.

Still, this multiple jobs reaction is a little weird. Seems worth exploring a bit more. Why are such people taking on multiple jobs, rather than doing better at one job?

A Question of Composition and Compensation

Simple math plus social dynamics. Multiple ‘full time’ jobs lead to much better pay.

In most salaried jobs, compensation is mostly dictated by social status and hierarchy. You are mostly paid what people with your title and position are paid.

A killer employee who can produce ten times as much work product of identical quality per hour, or superior work worth ten times as much – such as the standard ‘10x programmer’ – would be supremely lucky to earn double the pay of a worker of average skill.

This is a key reason why great employees are so valuable. Not only do you only manage and communicate with one person instead of ten, you save tons of money.

Why does it work this way? Compensation in jobs is inherently about comparisons, about social status, about hierarchy and about fairness norms. It is also about what can be justified to others, what is standard and what sounds ‘reasonable.’ If you tried paying your 10x employee five times what your 1x employees get paid, the 1x employees would revolt, the boss would think you were crazy and the funders would raise hell, you would resent that they’re paid more than you are, and so on. Also, they’d know the employee didn’t ‘need’ the money. Who do they think they are?

Our norms continuously push such dynamics towards equality.

Workarounds for Insufficient Pay Inequality

We do have several known existing solutions for this. I’ll consider the top three.

Option 1: The default reward is that by doing amazing work you would ‘get promoted’ into a different job, where you would have different tasks. Where you are likely not 10x the standard. One of those tasks will be management of other employees, which you likely hate and do not want to do. This then gives social justification for increased compensation, but destroys value and your experience. It will probably take many promotions to triple your compensation. Getting those promotions will likely require you doing battle inside a moral maze and be unlinked to your newfound production.

It is easy to see why someone getting a supercharge to their productivity from GPT-4 would be uninterested in climbing the corporate ladder.

Option 2: One can break free from salary or even hourly pay entirely, as some fields and professions allow. If you are for example a 10x salesman, artisan, trader, merchant, tournament competitor, poker player or author, you keep the extra production. There is no need to split your attentions to justify increasing your compensation.

Option 3: If you want to make the really big bucks, you do not want a job. What you want is equity. You want skin in the game. That is The Way.

I highly recommend to anyone who is capable and motivated that you want to take option three to the greatest extent possible. Early employee is good. Founder is better.

It is not simple, easy or safe.

Founding a company or running a business requires taking on a wide variety of other prob...