The theory of leather bags and the meaning of life

The bags are tired, they are stuffy.

They don’t smile. These are serious people. Respectable. They have to go to work, most of which can already be replaced by a single bot.

Leather bags have worked hard all their lives: they studied at school, university, took courses, got their first job, built a career… And here is a computer program that perfectly repeats their tasks. It doesn’t need to be studied all its life, a few months or even weeks will be enough.

Leather bags spend nine hours at work. Two more hours getting to work. Nine more hours sleeping and eating so they can arrive at their shift less tired. Two days a week they rest from work so they can go back to work on Monday. Once a year they take a vacation so they can work more efficiently.

The whole life of a bag is work. And then — survival (although it is desirable to work in retirement) and death.

If a bot has taken away your job, then the whole meaning of life?

Craft work and digital labels

Copywriters write in groups that they have to take on orders even for a hundred hryvnias per text. A bot will do this job better. So, maybe they should deliberately make small mistakes in the texts? That would be crafty human work, wouldn’t it? What, really not?

Bloggers send beautiful columns to the media and aren’t even shy about leaving hyphens instead of dashes and a million bullet points. They’re burning.

Designers are terrified of the conventional Midjourney or Nano Banana. It draws on the level. And PMs learn from the news that Anthropic is launching a new tool that will easily replace them in Slack.

Musicians are delighted with the programs that improve their voice and melody at times. Soon the radio will be full of new songs. We are waiting for «new talents» who have never written a single verse in their lives.

Judges scold lawyers for using ChatGPT to prepare lawsuits and not even removing program tags from the texts. And then the judges themselves sit down with a smart look and throw the parties' arguments into the same artificial intelligence: «Let it write everything down, and then I’ll decide.»

Biomass filters

About a third of game developers are unemployed. They are retraining to become electricians. We are waiting for them on the labor market! There will be many creative chandeliers and light bulbs.

Founders of large outsourcing companies speak at large conferences and declare that so many developers are no longer needed (only those with domain expertise — read as «old connections»). And HR, meanwhile, installs autonomous software to filter out «bad candidates.» HR doesn’t see people at all. Why do they need it when there is a program? Less nerves, calmer life.

Candidates, in turn, try to bypass this artificial filter and insert hidden prompts into their resumes so that the AI ​​​​gives preference to them. They want to get a job where 90% of the code will be written for them by a bot anyway.

Leather bags are annoying! They need to urgently learn a new profession to go to work again. Without work, they are just leather bags. Not predators or herbivores. They were something supernatural, something different: artists, analysts, writers, philosophers. And now it’s all a bot.

What’s next?

Work and everything around it is the main concept of life, the main meaning. Children are also born with the subconscious thought that they will have to work someday.

And if there is no work or it is not for everyone, then what will you do? What should you teach your children now: math, soft skills, or nothing at all? Panic.

Children go to school for ten years, then to university. And the American media writes that students have started to sound… the same during presentations. Beautiful, but impersonal. There are no more answers: «I don’t know, I didn’t prepare.» Everyone knows, everyone is ready. And how ready is checked by an independent teacher bot.

What to do? We are lazy creatures by nature. And here circumstances also push us. They say this is another industrial revolution that will free up our resources, which are occupied by routine, and then we will do… Hmm, what will we do? A question.

There are actually quite a few of us. Divide the 510.1 million sq. km of the planet by 8.3 billion people. Each leather bag will have a square of approximately 250 by 250 meters. And what is this biomass capable of?

You can, in principle, sit peacefully at home in front of the computer. You can go visit, you can eat (a lot). Or you can go somewhere to fight a war. Preferably a world war. Against those who stole this work. You have to have at least some meaning in life.