Date: 2026-07-26
I recently wrote a journal entry on a dream that I had in which I was working at a company and I was thinking of the company like a social club. The reason I was thinking this way in the dream was because I had been recently thinking about how work, in general, was being impacted by improvements in artificial intelligence and automation. I decided to create this page to describe what I have been thinking about.
I have been thinking about the incentives that people have when working for corporations or other large organizations. I have a suspicion that it may be the case that, over time, corporations tend to become social clubs in which many people are not actually doing useful work, and are instead engaged in complicated rituals designed to fill time and make it appear that the work they are doing is required to produce the outputs of the corporation even if that is not the case. Individual workers always have an incentive to to make it appear as if their work is required to produce the outputs of the corporation, because otherwise they would be at risk of losing their jobs if people were to notice that the corporation would function without them, and that the corporation would be able to increase its profit margin if the salary of the worker no longer had to be paid. However, in addition to the incentive that individual workers have to do this, as far as I can tell it appears that executives at the corporation also have an incentive to encourage the employees to engage in this behaviour as well.
The reason why executives might want to encourage employees to engage in unnecessary rituals designed to make it appear that their work is required has to do with maintaining the prices that corporation is able to charge for the outputs of the corporation. For work that is not automated and is actually required, there is a straightforward relationship between the minimum price that can be charged for the output of the corporation, and the amount of labour that was required to produce the output. If it takes a worker a certain number of hours to perform a task that is required to produce an output of the corporation, then the corporation has no choice but to pay the market rate that it costs to pay a worker to spend that amount of time performing the required labour. However, the situation changes if the labour being performed by the worker only has to be performed once, perhaps because the worker is being paid to create a system that automates the production of the output, and after that the output of the corporation can be produced without any further labour by a paid worker. In that case, theoretically the corporation has the ability to lower their prices dramatically after producing the initial output.
Unfortunately, the situation where it is possible to lower prices dramatically after producing the initial output creates a dilemma for the executives of the corporation. The goal of the executives of the corporation is to maximize profit on behalf of the shareholders. With the work now automated, it would theoretically be possible to lay off the employee that created the automated system in order to save the money that the corporation was previously spending on their salary. Ideally, the executives would prefer to do this while not lowering the prices that they charge their customers, so that their costs decrease while the revenue that the corporation is making from their customers stays the same. This would maximize the profit margin. However, if the corporation did this, and laid off the employee, there is nothing stopping that employee from automating the work again at a competing business which could then charge a lower price for the output of the corporation, and therefore force the original corporation to lower its prices as well due to the competition. For this reason, the corporation has an incentive not to lay off the employee, in order to prevent this from happening.
For the executive, the ideal solution would be to reassign the employee to another task rather than laying them off. However, if this is not possible, perhaps because there are no other tasks that the executive requires them to complete, then the second best option is for the employee to fill time and perform unnecessary work in order to create the appearance that the corporation still requires them to be there. If the employee completely stopped working in a various obvious way that people outside of the corporation were able to perceive, then people outside of the corporation would realize that it was possible to automate the work, and might attempt to start competing businesses themselves. Therefore, at the very least, the employee has to make it appear to people outside of the corporation that they are still doing necessary work.
Even though it is important for the employees to create the appearance to people outside the corporation that everyone inside the corporation is doing necessary work, this is not necessarily the case for other people inside the same corporation. As long as the other people inside the corporation can be trusted to keep the secret, and to not attempt to leave the corporation and start working at a competing business which will charge lower prices, then the employees can speak openly about the fact that they are aware that they are performing unnecessary rituals. This makes things much easier for the employees. In many cases it is difficult for employees to perform unnecessary work which appears believably required to someone who is paying attention closely. Therefore, the employees have an incentive to try to spend more of their time around people with whom they do not need to keep the secret that they are doing unnecessary work. This incentive causes social groups to be created which have multiple people actively coordinating to create the appearance that they are doing necessary work even though they are not.
Ideally, these social groups would be as large as possible, to minimize the amount of time that the employees need to spend engaged in unnecessary rituals. However, there are limits to how large the social groups can be. Since any person who is in the social group has the ability to inform people outside of the group that the people inside the group are doing unnecessary work, every person who is inside the group has to be satisfied that they are better off if they keep the secret. The most obvious way to do this is by paying them money to keep the secret. However, the corporation only has a limited amount of money that it can spend on salaries. Therefore, the people inside the social group have an incentive to also use other methods of convincing people to keep the secret. I have not been inside a group like this myself, and so I can only speculate, however it seems possible to me that people might end up using leverage in the form of blackmail, or even the threat of violence.
For people who are outside the social group of people that are aware that they are coordinating in order to fill time and keep prices high, there are a few options. If they are people who appear to be skilled enough that they could do the work that was required to create a competing business, while also appearing not to be trustworthy enough to keep the secret that people are intentionally coordinating in order to fill time, one option is to hire them and pay them to do work without telling them that it is unnecessary. This is preferable to including them in the social group and giving them leverage by telling them the truth, as they would be likely to accept a lower salary than the others inside the social group who are aware of the truth, and would not be able to reveal the secret if they left the corporation.
If it is not possible to hire them to do unnecessary work, perhaps because they are skilled enough to recognize that it is unnecessary, and at the same time are not trustworthy enough to keep the secret that people are intentionally coordinating in order to fill time, then there does not appear to be an easy solution. The people keeping the secret would have an incentive to do something to cause them to be unable to work for a competing business. If there is enough money involved, it seems possible to me that there could be an incentive to harm the reputation of the person who would not keep the secret to prevent them from being able to find employment elsewhere, or even potentially to use violence.
The recent rapid advancements in Artificial Intelligence appear to interact with this system in a significant way. AI is noteworthy in the fact that it is possible to use it to automate a very large number of jobs. Even jobs that that involve physical labour that do not appear to be easily automated using AI are able to be automated more quickly due to the fact that AI can be used to quickly design robots that are able to perform the physical labour. This creates a problem for the social groups inside corporations that are trying to fill time with unnecessary work in order to keep prices high. It seems likely that the number of people who are aware of these groups will increase as it becomes more obvious that people are doing jobs which could be done using AI. Eventually, the number of people who are aware of these groups will likely increase until the entire population is aware. At that point, it seems likely that we will need a new economic system.
I have already created another page on my website in which I have described some ideas for a system which uses money printed by the central bank to support the living expenses of people when we have a system in which many jobs are automated. One thing that I did not mention on that page is how the social aspect of corporations could be replaced.
One benefit of the current system that we have, which involves hiring people to do unnecessary work even though they are not aware of it, is that the unnecessary work actually provides social benefits to the employees that are engaged in the unnecessary work. People need a reason in order to socialize. If all work was completely automated, people would still need to find reasons in order to socialize. Corporations could still perform this function. On my page about printing money, I described how money could be printed on-demand in order to pay a person or a business for providing a service to another person. Corporations could theoretically be paid for the service of providing a social environment. Some of the employees at the corporation could still be doing useful work that is required to produce outputs of the corporation which are sold to generate revenue for the corporation, however others could have less well-defined roles and may not necessarily need to perform useful work. The government could theoretically pay corporations to continue to keep these employees, rather than laying them off, due to the fact that the corporation is providing the service of providing a social environment for the employee.
Personally, I have an image of the future in which corporations are a bit like countries. Many of the corporations would sell competing products, and the employees inside each corporation would be generally expected to use and promote the products sold by the corporation that they were employed by. In some cases, there could be competitive events that different corporations participated in, and the employees of each corporation would be expected to support their corporation, similar to how a person is expected to support their country at sports events like the Olympics.
In the future, as human civilization expands into space, there could be structures in space, like space stations, which each corporation creates using their own technology. The employees of each corporation could then occupy and operate the space stations owned by their corporation. There could be competitive drone battles, or perhaps large role-playing experiences so that people can participate in experiences that are similar to those portrayed on television shows like Star Trek, with each corporation being conceptually similar to an alien race on Star Trek, each with its own technology and culture. It sounds pretty cool to me.