The paradox is this. A job seeker is looking for a well-defined job. But the trend seems to be that if a job can be defined, it can be automated or outsourced. The marginal product of people who need well-defined jobs is declining. The marginal product of people who can thrive in less structured environments is increasing.

See also zero marginal product workers what fraction of the economy is pretend work, appearing to be busy?
2013-08-20: On the predicament of ZMP (0 marginal product) workers:

Huge swathes of people spend their entire working lives performing tasks they secretly believe do not really need to be performed. The moral and spiritual damage that comes from this situation is profound. It is a scar across our collective soul.

2014-11-21: When the revolution comes, this will be very useful to smoke out people.
2018-06-07: A New Yorker take

Bullshit, like paper waste, accumulates in offices with the inevitability of February snow. Justification reports: What are these? Nobody knows. And yet they pile up around you, Xerox-warmed, to be not-read. Best-practices documents? Anybody’s guess, really, including their authors’. Some people thought that digitization would banish this nonsense. Those people were wrong. Now, all day, you get e-mails about “consumer intimacy” (oh, boy); “all hands” (whose hands?); and the new expense-reporting software, which requires that all receipts be mounted on paper, scanned, and uploaded to a server that rejects them, since you failed to pre-file the crucial post-travel form. If you’re lucky, bullshit of this genre consumes only a few hours of your normal workweek. If you’re among the millions of less fortunate Americans, it is the basis of your entire career.

2018-09-20: Scott Alexander looks into the topic

I write a note saying: To whom it may concern: I am a psychiatrist treating Mr. Smith. He tells me that he has chronic back pain (“lumbago”), and asks to be allowed to bring in his own chair to work. Yours, Dr. Alexander It’s too soon to have a good sample size. But it seems to usually work. I think it works because there is nobody at Mr. Smith’s workplace – maybe nobody in the entire world – who’s really invested in preventing Mr. Smith from bringing a chair into work. Someone wrote up a procedure for employees using special chairs, so that they’re not the sort of cowboys who make decisions without procedures. Someone else feels like they have to enforce it, so that they’re not the sort of rebel who flouts procedures. But nobody cares.

2021-03-06: It’s surprising that it took so long to automate extremely low value work like copying & pasting, and somehow requiring a college degree:

they do the dull-but-critical tasks that someone named Phil in Accounting used to do: reconciling bank statements, approving expense reports, reviewing tax forms. […] She’d known that her job was straightforward and repetitive, making it low-hanging fruit for automation. The experience was a wake-up call. She had a college degree and was early in her career.

2023-01-17: The race between bullshit jobs and automation

We escaped the original Malthusian trap with the Industrial Revolution, expanding capacity faster than the population could grow. A sufficient lead altered underlying conditions to the point where we should worry more about declining population than rising population in most places.

Consider the same scenario for a potential AI Revolution via GPT-4.

Presume GPT-4 allows partial or complete automation of a large percentage of existing bullshit jobs. What happens?

My model says this depends on the speed of adaptation.