Basically the only non-educated work that's going to be available to be had is going to be service-sector jobs. Since AIs are capable of doing practically everything dumb labor is capable of doing - and doing so without ever losing its attention span, or thinking "I hate my job, I hate my boss, I hate my life," etc... There's going to be [i]very[/i] slim pickings indeed. Basically, for the uneducated Martian who lacks the resources to put themselves through college (or, if they were smart, to egocast to Titan, or hitch a ride on the GYAtM swarm,) prospects are very, very slim indeed. You have: An armed trade. Whether it's breaking knees for your friendly local gang, or joining the nearest military, dumb youngsters with physically fit morphs can always find a job as cannon fodder! Scavenging. Basically, going to abandoned places, scavenging anything you can sell for scrap, and hoping you don't get caught. Signing yourself away as an indenture to gain resources. If you do this, as an unskilled schmuck, you're looking at a lovely term of existence as an infomorph file server, a prostitute, or a labor robot. Basically, the inner system's hella dystopian. If 95% of transhumanity hadn't carked it during the fall, these problems would be rampagingly crippling. As things are, though, there's relatively few transhumans left, most of those that are left are either in the kind of place where they'll educate people without requiring those people to give them something in return that they don't have (like Titan,) or are somewhere they can get ad hoc training (a Scum swar, Autonomist habitat,) or they just aren't. It's worth noting that transhumanity probably isn't reproducing nearly as much as they used to, since the main focus is on reinstantiating the infugees.

[b]"Uberization" of work[/b] Majority of people are freelancer, as stated above and in the text. I bet a good deal of people end up wearing multiple "hats" throughout the day. E.g., you see the local Spacebucks™ is forecasting an above-average peak today, so you pick up a three-hour barista contact with them. On the way there (it's in another dome), you spend time doing customer-service mesh work for a manufacturer whose consumer widgets have been faulty--an AI could field these complaints, sure, but angry customers are better assuaged with an actual transhuman on the other end. The Spacebucks™ is, indeed, swamped this morning, but during brief lulls, rather than chatting with the other barista, you do some sartorial piecework, working via your mesh inserts, submitting high-end fashion designs that you hope will get you noticed. A few other thoughts: [b]food, beverage, hospitality[/b] I bet there is still a demand for waitstaff, cooks, baristas, mixologist, etc. The EP equivalent of a fast food joint could be entirely automated, but is seems like for many places, the human interaction is part of the thing they are selling. Also, while my own (boring) preferences in coffee could probably be fulfilled fine by an AI, I do think there is enough room for creativity/invention/etc in meal/drink prepartion that a human will outperform an AI. [b]drinking from a firehose[/b] Egos can be used to deal with the information overload of 10AF. Really, this is happening already (I know, having either [url=http://www.lionbridge.com/careers/]worked at[/url] or [url=https://seattle.craigslist.org/est/tch/4866493159.html]interviewed at[/url] jobs that basically do this). Certainly plain old AI can do a lot of this, but impoverished/indentured egos can often do a better job for nearly as cheap. This can have some particularly sinister applications in maintaining the panopticon. Those spimes by the high-security facility the PCs are casing? No idiot AIs in them: a team of indentures spies through each camera. Five egos to camera, and the egos are made to compete against each other, getting perks for more accurate/timely flagging of suspicious activity, getting punishment for slacking off/getting bored. Loyality is thus also enforced (since indents might be resentful about their situation). Same thing with mesh traffic. Trying to spread terroristic memes on Mars? Have egos tasked to flag suspicious mesh activity. Again, they can go better than plain-old AI, what with transhuman egos being able to discern nuance, subtlety, facetiousness, etc in communication. [b]Some relevant links:[/b] http://rein.pk/replacing-middle-management-with-apis/ http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/29/technology/personaltech/uber-a-rising-... http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/globalguerrillas/2014/12/the-road-to...

You don't get out of the server or cold storage unless you're willing to slave for the corp in the Inner System at the job they pick you for. If you're really unlucky and died in the Fall, your skillset is probably 10 years out of date and the tech keeps marching on, so you're going to be shoveling squat in the virtual coal mine until you can train yourself. Otherwise, the only reason you'd be working is because it's a job that doesn't have a great return on investment if they bot it. Like the old joke about Irishmen sent to clean out the coal mine in the old days. Instead of blacks - you send the Irishman because the black guy has a dollar value. Melt is a great example of this. (And yeah, it's not a real funny joke.)

Diamond Age shows a good example of what to do with teeming masses: abject but functionally living poverty, watching free entertainment and consuming the most bland food from public fabbers. In Rainbows End they include the 'uberized' google assistants. Essentially people freelance research with "association" which is a convoluted pyramid of freelancers paid often just to google things using your brain rather than a dumb AI.

F-rep work. For low skill but interesting people being an XP star, or becoming a minor mesh personality are going to be pretty good routes. You can make decent money selling XP of martian free climbing, or some other experience with a lot of prerequisite skills anywhere. High end service work is probably still around, but probably indenture dominated in many habs. If you're boring, broke, and lack relevant skills, you're screwed pretty much anywhere in system. Anarchists aren't huge fans of people who can't actually contribute to the hab, so don't expect a free ride from them. Best bet is probably Titan or an indenture contract with vocational training, or simply learning something useful fast.

Even if you have the blueprint for an atomic battery, you still have to have enough radioactive materials to make the thing. Not exactly a job for a shovelful of dirt.

However, it should be noted that it's not like you do no work. At some point, somebody needs to actually put a shovel in the Martian dirt and sort it all into the CM. And push the buttons on the CM. And fix the shovel. And... you get the idea. No one in the system is entirely exempt from the requirement to do work, even adding automation means somebody has to fix, program and order robots (as having robots, fix, build and lead themselves in the past has gone very poorly). BUT, you don't always have to work for money which you can then spend on your daily bread. Your work either leads to bread directly, or the bread is accounted for in return for your labor. And in general, you and your immediate neighbor's quality of life might take a sharp decline if you and them don't do the work. Even if you're synth or info. Not that this particular aspect of the discussion does a whole lot to answer the original prompting questions.

I'd wager Oversight's copy protection wing is a little subtler than that. They probably show up in the dark of night with stunners, slap you in cuff bands and it's off to the penal simulspace with you, Redneck.

While I would like to make a serious post about this subject, I don't have time at the moment, so I will just say: The best job for a high school / college student is to get involved in Esport! Join a professional guild in Dragonquest V and earn extra credits doing what you love the most. VR gaming!

ThatWhichNeverWas wrote:

If you're a synthmorph, then all you need to live is a piece of hull to hide behind, or if you're on mars a shovel so that you can dig a hole in the regolith.

Actually, as per the Lifestyle rules, even the shittiest living conditions are "Trivial" per month. For Synths that basically means you crash in public spaces set aside to hold Synths, or you have to cling to the exterior hull in space (which is a shitty way to live, being additional ablative micrometeor shielding). Low for Synthmorphs mean you own a capsule hotel room to downcycle and keep your possessions in. At Moderate, you can actually own a decently sized storage closet because you don't need to eat or drink, and you can actually regularly pay for maintenance and upkeep (the synth equivalent of medical. Or were we assuming entropy did not effect synths?). From there, Synth living space and stylings are the same as a biomorph, but again, their budget and free space is a little bigger. Now, on Mars, sure, you can shovel, but Mars is not the entirety of the Solar System. There's Luna, Orbital, Venus and the Main Belt to consider when we talk about needing a job, plus all the various Extropian holds scattered throughout the system. Mars would actually be the best place TO work to live, because you could actually have a decent amount of living space. I mean, even Low gets you a whole shipping container home, that's pretty good considering the guys in orbit have closets. And just because you're cold steel and don't have to eat doesn't mean you don't want to have some free space and access to services. Again, not that this does much to answer the original question. The age and skill range we're talking about here probably isn't prepared to just take their plasma spade and go poke the dirt after selling off their perfectly good Splicer (or not-so-perfect Ruster) to become a Synth and be slightly creepy and potentially discriminated against and live the Nomad free life. So they definitely will need to do some work to maintain lifestyle, and what would that work be?

ThatWhichNeverWas wrote:

Thus, valets. Sure, your car can park itself because of the Indentured infomorph driver, but having an actual Sleeved Person do it for you regardless? That's status.

For someone who earlier said to be on the PC side, you are not doing a good job of avoiding the obvious and cartoonish strawman for the PC. The car parks itself because it has an AI in it, like nearly every piece of tech. An AI which is completely capable of piloting the vehicle or assisting a driver, has complete knowledge of the specs, and is designed for this job. Some Indenture stuck driving cars is not going to be as good at it as the AI. Sure, you probably drive yourself places if you feel like it, and if you're really big you might employ a driver (who doubles as security), but in terms of "park yourself" the AI can do it. And honestly, employing someone to park your car might be more luxurious, it's not very secure. And those Anarchist boogeymen are out there everywhere. Who would want some punk indenture (or worse, someone who is actually PAID to do this job, who's that desperate?) sitting in their nice shiny car, rifling through their things, checking out their music library, maybe stealing your DNA to sell to Les Ghoules. You gain nothing from it, the car you paid for already has that function, why do you need some shmuck to do it? I'd almost take is as an insult. This location assumes I did not buy a car smart enough to park itself, they need someone to come rub his residue all over my genuine tiger-pelt seats to park it?

Physical communication (or at least, immediately local) can be secured and is lag-free (this is why people like to send Forks to do business also) while long-range communication or communication on busy networks is very difficult or expensive to secure and can experience latency. This means you need a location to actually do that at, preferably which you own. You need a place to store things, including your computers, because the mesh is not magically everywhere, it's everywhere because things are all mesh nodes, and presumably you want something you own and control handling your end of the mesh you use. Depending on what you do, you may actually have to handle physical product or relate to physical persons for your corp's business. To say nothing of active R&D which requires either expensively high quality simulspace servers or actual lab space. I think this is mentioned somewhere, but the hypercorps are as virtual as they need to be. The banking corp (Solaris I think?) is almost entirely digital because they just track digital data, they don't do physical banking (as far as I know). So their "office" is just a server in a closet at whatever their Planetary Consortium embassy is. Meanwhile, a company like Fa-Jing who handles mining and heavy industry needs lots of space to story physical product and necessary equipment, which probably needs some physical management, so they have warehouses with physical office space so people can manage things on site and be able to physically interact with things. Even if, say, you're a software company or a personal electronics company who designs and "builds" everything in a virtual space, you need somewhere to hold your servers to run all those informorphs, and you probably want a guy to poke in and make sure all your cables are still connected and the cooling unit hasn't melted because you overclocked the server to meet a deadline or something.

ThatWhichNeverWas wrote:

*The way credit/catagory system drives me insane – as it stands, 1 week of work at rep level 1 will provide a “Basics” lifestyle from anywhere from 2 weeks to 4.16 years. How the hell can conclusions be made on a range that large?

Well, abstractions are abstractions. This will cause problems, I won't argue with that.

ThatWhichNeverWas wrote:

A quick side note - Just for absolute clarity, my interpretation of the indenture system is that the PC often uses indentured egos instead of AIs. Any indenture who gets “employed” as a vehicle is going to know how to drive competently, and will be much better at dealing with thieves. That said, an AI would likely perform better at the task... but that can be said about pretty much every task an Indenture would be used for save Prostitution. Maybe.

Personally, while I agree that the PC, LLA and some outfits on Venus use Indentures to substitute where others might rely on AI (bot jamming, physical labor, rote tasks in simulspace), I don't think they would use them in place of basically device AI, which are in almost any discrete piece of tech. The AI is already installed, and transhuman Egos do not function very well when placed in such limited and simplistic environments. You don't typically substitute your Muse for an indenture, right? It's a similar principle. (And on the other subject, I had this discussion once, and concluded that AI wouldn't work as well as prostitutes. Sure, they can do the actual sex part really well, but with aptitude and skill limitations, and socialization/social interaction elements, a transhuman thrown in a pleasure pod would measure up and interact much more comfortably with people. If you just want a fantastic lay, you can get XP or hit up simulspace)

ThatWhichNeverWas wrote:

… and how is this different to valets/chauffeurs today? Or maids, or waiters... The only way you can be secure is if the only people you interact with are wealthier than you. For another angle, the added risk of voluntary human interaction can work as effectively as unnecessary expense - “Look at what I can afford to lose.”

It isn't, but we don't have a solid alternative which provides both security and convenience. The hyperelite of eclipse phase do. Though maids or housestaff would probably be specifically contracted to you, so it's going to be harder for them to fence your antique earth objects (especially if they don't read the contracts provisions on psychosurgery well), and it's not like the waiter can steal your credit card, but anyway, we're getting too deep into the minutiae. My personal interpretation of the hyperelite is that, while they dump extravagant amounts of money on impractical things, the don't do things which don't benefit them. Smoking because you can buy new lungs makes you look good and you get the benefits of smoking. Having your car stolen, crashed or your ID scammed loses you money and gets you a reputation as that guy who keeps losing cars. When combined with the simplicity of the in-built AI to do the job which is literally just "park the car so I don't have to park and walk", it just doesn't seem to have any benefit. And like I said, he's just going to mess up the seats.

ThatWhichNeverWas wrote:

It's all about context. I keep ending up on the Pro-PC camp, but only as voice of moderation. Both you and ShadowDragon highlighted the job-finding situation very well, but imply a Soylent Green/Elysium-esque privation-dystopia... and that clashes with the canon on how life is like for PC citizens. Now, I'm not saying the PC is “nice”. To the contrary, I agree that it's a dystopia – but a different kind of dystopia. One where Control isn't maintained by something so mundane as hunger, but rather by psychology and luxury. Think “Brave New World”, “THX 1138”, “Logan's Run”, “Equilibrium” “They Live” and life on the Island in “The Island”. Also “Men In Black”.

Well, I honestly don't feel that the direct PC themselves is quite that bad, with masses of unemployed wandering around in squalor, though that is noted as there being an employment problem on Mars as one of the points of the Barsoomian movement (Indenture is slavery. And also ex-Indentures end up on the job market but all the jobs they know how to do are taken by the next cycle of indentures). I didn't necessarily mean to imply that. My angle is more that this demographic (student or not) will be fairly limited compared to volume of indentures, and that most people honestly probably start at vocational training. Because I have no goddamn idea what the public education infrastructure (if any) is like, so personally I assume most volumes of young people have probably had to at one point or another pitch in at what their parents do, or are at least familiar with the elements of their work. You can translate that into doing limited jobs in your locale that people don't want or can't afford to bring indentures in for. If you're really good or really rich, you don't have to worry, somebody else will pay for your schooling (Since the PC practically lives by the illusion of universal upward mobility, schools associated with them definitely offer scholarships), so we're mostly talking about lower or middle class people with average talents who yet lack specialized training (and again, I'm not saying there are a whole ton of those people who aren't also already infugees being indentured anyway). I wouldn't think they do the typical service jobs you'd expect or are as typical now; automation and the use of AI/indentures has cut down on that a lot. They could do indenture themselves, or do some kind of work-study, or they could do some other stuff we've talked about like apprenticeship, basically paid internship, that kind of thing. Personally, my point was more to the fact that the days of flipping burgers after school are probably done, and that EP is a broad and complex world, so there are a lot of options out there. We should try and think a little broader and more complex. (And of course, there's my personal ongoing rule of interpretation, is this more "future", Y/N? If something makes the setting seem more "future", I usually go for it. )

ThatWhichNeverWas wrote:

That seems reasonable... there are going to be some jobs that Egos are spectacularly unsuitable for - I wouldn't say that PC firearms use indentures, for example. However, things like bots and vehicles would definitely qualify, and indentures would be used for controlling groups of simple items - a small apartment building would have an Indenture controlling the apartments' thermostats, another monitoring the power, another keeping track of the amount of sewage/garbage going to the recycle and crediting the domiciles' inhabitant accordingly, and so on. You know, stuff which requires constant attention but is crushingly boring, which aligns with Transhuman's bit on life as an Indent. You're probably right about Sexbots though. I just really want an excuse to yell "Initiate Slut-Mode." at my players :P

I mean, I can't really see it for vehicles. Bots either operate on AI or without, but most vehicles you can directly drive. Personal vehicles might not have a great environment for running a full Ego, and the average person can't exactly afford an indenture contract. There's a reason those take a few years to pay out. I'm pretty sure there would be an indenture watching your apartment or hotel's OS, but given the emphasis on multitasking (I mean, they have Speed 3), it's probably just the one. Hardwire Multi-tasking or Panopticon into the server and somebody can probably monitor all the data feeds easy.

ThatWhichNeverWas wrote:

It's also noted (iirc) that most Indents spring for a biomorph once they're free - so the Idents which get out of the system are those with either exceptional skill, those willing to start schmoozing up to their social "betters", or those willing to endure personal discomfort or humiliation to get ahead - all of which are Pro-PC personality types. The unemployment rate and police corruption actually speeds this along - the system is working as intended. Honestly, Indenture makes so much more sense as a method of social indoctrination, than an actual economic measure. It also changes the Oligarchs who set up the PC from greedy, idiotic children into horrifyingly intelligent masters of societal engineering and memetics. Which I like.

I wouldn't say it's so much "spring" as that the biomorph is part of the payout. I mean, if you're going to go to all the trouble of breaking rocks everyday in a case, you'd want something nice at the end. The impression I've always got is that biomorphs are much more comfortable and cost effective in terms of living in one, but expensed by their inherent scarcity. You can only grow so many bios so fast, but it's a lot more natural and functional way to live. Especially if you've spent 4 years in a shitty robot unable to eat, drink or breathe. Indenture as a social engineering attempt for the PC (Luna's treatment of the clanking masses kind of kills that theory for them) makes a lot of sense, especially given their background, but it's obviously not as effective as intended. If Sunward is anything to go by, a large volume of Indentures go on to become part of the Movement (I think the #1 reason is stated as the indenture issue, but they have other complaints), probably a lot of ones doing the shitty rote work we're discussing. And remember, Rusters and Alpiners are biomorphs too, and they come with a PC leash attached. Actually, a lot of the anti-PC rednecks on Mars are probably in bios to. The concept of synth/bio/pod as a social disconnect is much stronger in Luna, though the classicism can be emphasized in some major PC holdings or Martian Cities (Progress and Elysium spring to mind).

ThatWhichNeverWas wrote:

Ahhh, you misunderstood me a little. I'm not talking about Hyperelite-level stuff, but the equivalent of lower-middle class - standard working Joe. Student-valets would be used in "nice" restaurants as opposed to really high level stuff - the sort of place where a significant portion of the customers were valets themselves a few years beforehand. The next level after that may still use valet's, but they would be trained professionals, and likely part of the establishment's security team, staying with the vehicle to act as a second layer of defence against theft or tampering. Above that, the vehicle is actually being sleeved by (and fully capable of acting as) the owner's bodyguard - a reaper with a passenger compartment. No valets necessary.

Well, again, based on the Lifestyle rules, I don't know how common personal vehicles are to the modern urban transhuman. Bikes or personal Cycles are probably easy enough but the Lifestyle rules seem to imply you need to be making decent buck to have a personal vehicle. Public transport or the classic human power (bicycles, hoverboards, parkour) seem more common. And if you did, you definitely wouldn't have an indenture to drive your car, so you could again very easily tell the car to go park itself, no different than any other packed day going shopping on Bleaker Street in Qianjao. Obviously, I could see some places retaining the service for the aesthetics, but a niche market might not be our best example. Hybridizing it with security makes more sense, though again, I don't know if that's exactly our barometer of student employment. (And personally, like I said, having a valet park your car, especially when we're not talking about extravagant luxury excess, just doesn't scream "the future" for me. I mean, we've got "self-parking" cars now which have that as a big selling point, I can't believe that people in the future wouldn't do that all the time. It's too convenient)

Redroverone wrote:

1. In any class society, ways to reinforce your class status are firmly embraced, even if they are inefficient.

Right, except that we'd just moved on from that aspect. Hence "especially when we're not talking about extravagant luxury excess". Plus convenience culture

Redroverone wrote:

2. Most inner system societies are by nature and definition conservative, therefore most likely to hold to antiquated societal constructs.

I highly doubt that especially in a fast-paced, consumer and technology driven world of EP, many people would be conservative enough to hold to the societal constructs of 120 years ago. Valet parking as a term seems to originate maybe around the 60s as far as I can tell, maybe the 30s. I'm also not sure how common it is outside of the united states. Conservative doesn't mean "antique", in EP it tends to mean "not jumping headfirst into specific social structures and technologies which have emerged in the last couple of decades". And this discussion is rapidly approaching the ludicrous tangent limit. The car comes with an AI, just like 90% of tech in EP does, regardless of where in the system you obtain one. That AI has a 40% in Pilot, which should be more than enough for it to be guided via the mesh to a parking structure, wherever that is. It might not even be close, Mars is pretty packed, and Mars is basically the only place you'd really drive around in. Give the parking area an AI or a transhuman to run it, it covers all the practical applications of getting a physical valet to run out and operate your car. There is no convenience added by a physical valet, only a limited aesthetic luxury, which may or may not put it outside the typical demographic for which this topic is discussing employment, even if currently most valets are typically in the 18-28 range. I will now move on from this discussion point. Unless someone has some brand new salient points to add to this specific matter, I humbly suggest everyone else get on with it as well. EDIT: Okay, so on the subject of salient points, with some other people discussing this, I've done some processing the numbers. Ground Cars or Flying Cars are already very expensive. A Vehicle AI on it's own is [High], assuming you don't count that as installed in something as costly and high quality as a car already (I lean towards that interpretation of the information on AI personally, but Rule 0 applies. Especially given as discussed, we're working on functional self-parking or self-driving cars now). Buying an Ego to indenture from cold storage from a company like IndEX is between 200-500 credits, with between 200 to 2000 CR in additional fees. To say nothing of providing the indenture with a body at the end, which if you're doing the normal Synth or Splicer is [High]. You can get them a [Moderate] basic pod and make this a pretty efficient scheme, which is how I assume lots of the people rich enough to "hire" full-time servants operates, though this wraps us back around to the source topic in that employing indentures is only cheap when you're cheap (and if you're cheap it's way cheaper than hiring normal people). That being said, Transhuman paints vehicle expenses as requiring a [High] expense per month, as a lifestyle. Using NPC File 1 as a guideline, depending on who you want to consider our "working class", they might earn between 50-125 credits a week. My conclusion is that valets or even chauffeurs as indentures may be a viable market (assuming you're being supremely economical about it), but in general we're discussing a situation which seems more and more of an outlier all the time, and it probably doesn't work for the demographic originally ascribed in the OP of the topic. Actually going out to eat and driving a car to do so seems like something you'd need to be pretty well off to do, and you can probably afford to have your car handle itself than get somebody extra to do it (though some places might throw it in for an added flair, I just don't know if that's standard stuff for 'unskilled laborers'). Also, crunching cost numbers in EP is cray, and it makes my head hurt.