Toward the end of the article by British philosopher John Gray on relativism that I discussed in my most recent Corner post, Gray has this to say about the value of the education being given to too many students on too many campuses:

Higher education has been reorganised on a market model, but there is a dwindling market for the legions of students it recruits. Old-fashioned humanities curriculums of a kind now condemned inculcated mental skills that could be useful in a variety of occupations. Instruction in progressive doublespeak prepares heavily indebted graduates for jobs as baristas and food delivery couriers, positions from which they may soon be displaced by AI-directed robots.

There’s a lot of truth to that, with an important exception that Gray touches on in his next paragraph:

The mass intelligentsia of the post-liberal West is more like a Soviet-style nomenklatura, a class of bureaucrats embedded in key institutions throughout society, whose function was to enforce the ruling ideology. When communism imploded, they found themselves superfluous and redundant. As capitalism drifts into crisis, our intellectual bureaucrats face a similar fate.

Gray’s first sentence in that second paragraph holds true whether it is applied to academia, the administrative state, the NGO world, much of the media, or, indeed, the private sector with its profusion of HR departments, “sustainability” officers, and the whole ESG infrastructure of pious, greedy conmen and, of course, the rent-seekers — the “consultants” and all the rest — who help businesses navigate their way through it.

“As capitalism drifts into crisis”: As I mentioned in my last post, Gray is someone to whom I rarely turn for anything approaching good cheer. This, however, is not to deny that capitalism (to use a shorthand term) might be heading towards some choppy water, whether (to take just a few of the more menacing storm clouds) as a result of the vast amounts of debt that governments have been piling up, or the threat from both the “traditional” left and corporatists of left and right, or the current “race” to net zero, an approach to a changing climate that, if pursued to its logical and illogical conclusion, will take countries that choose that path uncomfortably close to a command economy.

But there is something else lurking in Gray’s words to add to the gloom, which is his reference to job displacement by AI. We have, of course, yet to see the full extent of what AI, to give his examples, will mean for baristas and food delivery couriers (in fact, food-delivery robots are already out and about here and there, as are a robot barista or two, without much help from AI). But, if AI lives up to some of the claims made for it, the implications for jobs of a type more traditionally requiring degrees (including, I suppose, as ideological enforcers) would also be grim.

It may be that AI will create as many or more jobs than it destroys (there are plenty of historical precedents to suggest that it will), but even if it does, how long will that job creation process take, and how good will those new jobs be? Back in 2016, I wrote about this rather gloomily in the broader context of the next level of automation. Those questions have not gone away.