Sam Altman isn’t known for understatement, but even by his own standards, what he said on stage at OpenAI’s DevDay conference earlier this month was pretty problematic. In a live interview with AI newsletter founder Rowan Cheung, Altman made a sweeping claim that many jobs that vanish in the age of large language models might not have been “real work” in the first place.
Responding to a thought experiment about how a farmer from 50 years ago might view our current reality, Altman said, “The thing about that farmer… [is that] they very likely would look at what you do and I do and say, ‘that’s not real work.’” Altman said this makes him feel “a little less worried… [but] more worried in some ways. If you’re… farming… you’re doing something people really need. This is real work.”
Graeber’s core claim — that entire sectors of the economy are built on box-ticking bureaucracy with no social value — has been cited by everyone from disgruntled office workers to policy think tanks. Altman’s framing felt smug, sure, but it’s not without precedent.
The trouble is, the data hasn’t really backed it up. A 2021 study using the European Social Survey found that only about five percent of people said their jobs felt useless. A similar U.S. study put that number closer to twenty percent. In both cases, the researchers concluded that feelings of pointlessness were more about poor management and work culture than about the job itself. If your boss is a micromanager and your workflow is broken, even valuable work can feel fake. That’s not proof that the role should be automated out of existence.
Where Altman’s comment holds water is in what it hints at, even if it doesn’t spell it out. Most jobs aren’t fake, but many have accumulated layers of automatable junk: compliance checklists, reports nobody reads, emails summarizing meetings that could’ve been Slack threads. That’s the kind of “game-playing” work LLMs are already good at. When Altman says these models will wipe out tasks, not just roles, this is what he likely means. And on that point, he could be right.
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