Back to the landed gentry

What will be the new status game when AI replaces knowledge work?

I am in an existential mood after my experience playing with new OpenAI features the other day. This is what I have been thinking through. There are clearly very large assumptions you have to believe for any of this to be true, but humor me here:

1. Many people today use careers in knowledge work to gain social status. I would argue that working to become a partner at a consulting firm, for example, is driven more by status-seeking than by the pleasure of consumption in a vacuum (without other people to admire it), or by the intellectual stimulation (I don’t think this is negligible but I think status is more important)

2. AI will render most “knowledge work” done by humans obsolete. Huge assumption, and certainly new ways for humans to be productive I can’t predict will be invented, but I am convinced knowledge work will look drastically different in the next decade or two.

3. Without knowledge work, many people will need to find a different way to communicate status with others. I think it is clear that people need some way to convey status to others; Eugene Wei writes brilliantly about this. If it is no longer impressive to have studied to become, uh, a data scientist, because the job has become trivially easy to do with technology, what does that purely hypothetical data scientist do to convey status?

There are certainly some economic skills that seem like they will be robust to AI that will probably gain status: the ability to sell stuff, the ability to make people feel happy or comfortable or inspired. These seem innately human and jobs that require them will probably attract more ambitious people: sales, healthcare, teaching.

But I wonder if in some ways people will start to look more like the aristocracies you read about in books from the 1800s. If wealth is plentiful for a lot of people through ownership of increasingly productive capital, maybe people start to look more like the landed gentry: not working much and competing for status by studying erudite things, being good conversationalists, having good manners, being good at horse racing. Anna Karenina has a happy ending, right?