Modern jobs

Great conversation between Ken Liu and Nick Admussen. Here. My favorite bit: Liu compares the work of a programmer, a lawyer and a fiction writer–and most modern jobs:

I’m like many other people in modern society: we’re paid to become skilled manipulators of symbols. One of the signs of modernity is the degree to which we cease to make anything concrete. A lot of our jobs are about manipulating symbols and putting them into virtual symbolic structures. We are engineers of symbols, if you will. That’s really what most modern jobs are.