In Douglas Adams’ classic, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, the Golgafrinchans rid themselves of an entire useless third of their population by packing off all the ‘lanyard class’ and clipboard-ticker types on a gigantic Ark. Ironically, the Ark crashes on the primitive Earth, with the useless Golgafrinchans becoming the ancestors of humanity, which explains why our species is so weighted down by essentially useless white collar parasites.
AI may be about to finish the job the Golgafrinchans started.
[Consulting] firms like McKinsey tout themselves as the “CEO factory”, and boast they’re “not surprised” to be consistently named the best place for future leaders […]
But that value proposition no longer holds in the age of AI.
Well, cry me a river.
The Guardian’s hand-wringing over consulting firms losing their grip on the ‘CEO factory’ pipeline is rich. The writer laments that entry-level analyst roles once offered “the best possible training ground in existence 10 years ago”: for what, exactly? For putting on the golden lanyard and collecting a fat fee for churning out reams of high-falutin’ dreck.
Spare me the ego-stroking about ‘synthesis, sharp analysis, crisp communication’. These are not the jobs of plumbers or truck drivers. These are the middle-class, white, university-educated roles of the writer’s own class. The same cohort that spent years sneering at ‘deplorables’ for protesting about losing manufacturing work to China and India now discovers the same logic applies to them – and they don’t like it one bit.
The Washington Post’s interactive chart on AI-exposed occupations makes the same point in more genteel language. Past technological shifts destroyed entire categories of work, from switchboard operators to elevator operators. Economists have a bad track record predicting outcomes, but the pattern is consistent: new tools eliminate tasks that once required human hands or brains. Where was the concern when ostlers and buggy-whip makers were told their trades were obsolete?
The WaPo gives away the real reason for the almighty caterwauling about AI: it’s coming for the HR Karens.
Women make up about 86 per cent of those most vulnerable workers, the researchers said, suggesting the negative effects of automation won’t be borne equally across society.
When male blue-collar workers watched factories close, the pampered girls of the lanyard class and their HR Karens simply sneered at them to ‘retrain and up-skill’. Now the same advice is being handed back to the people who dished it out.
This isn’t, though, the first time large numbers of women were technologied out of a job.
Another extinct occupation, telephone switchboard operators […] was once one of the most common jobs for American women, but jobs were wiped out as telephones modernized starting in the early 20th century, according to a research paper published in 2024 by James Feigenbaum and Daniel Gross.
But switchboard operators were essentially blue-collar female jobs. So, who cared about them?
Switchboard operators who lost their jobs were far more likely than their peers to never find other work or to take lower-paying jobs, the research found. But within years, new opportunities opened for young women as secretarial and restaurant work boomed. “I read that as somewhat hopeful,” Feigenbaum, a Boston University economic historian, said in an interview.
Feigenbaum doesn’t buy the argument that AI will be much different for American workers than prior technology revolutions. The invention of electricity, the internal combustion engine and the internet were massively transformative technologies, he said, and “that didn’t eliminate all jobs.”
The left’s sudden panic over white-collar displacement reveals the hypocrisy. When automation and offshoring hammered working-class communities, the response was a shrug and lectures about inevitable progress. Now that the same forces are eating the prestige careers of Guardian readers and their dinner-party guests, suddenly it is a civilisational crisis. The lanyard class is being forced to swallow the medicine it prescribes for everyone else.
Before we get too smug, though, it’s worth remembering that the rest of the Golgafrinchans, having rid themselves of telephone sanitisers, “lived full, rich and happy lives until they were all suddenly killed off by a raging disease contracted from a dirty telephone”.
