Will A.I. Kill Meaningless Jobs?

Hard not to think of government having a preponderance of “meaningless jobs,” such as drafting talking points, Q&As, along with basic application processing, call centre and chat routine enquiries etc:

…Kevin Kelly, a Wired co-founder who has written many books on technology, said he was somewhat optimistic about the effect A.I. would have on meaningless work. He said he believed that partly because workers might begin probing deeper questions about what made a good job.

Mr. Kelly has laid out a cycle of the psychology of job automation. Stage 1: “A robot/computer cannot possibly do what I do.” Stage 3: “OK, it can do everything I do, except it needs me when it breaks down, which is often.” Skip ahead to Stage 5: “Whew, that was a job that no human was meant to do, but what about me?” The worker finds a new and more invigorating pursuit, leading full circle to Stage 7: “I am so glad a robot cannot possibly do what I do.”

It’s demoralizing to realize that your job can be replaced by technology. It can bring the pointlessness into sharp relief. And it can also nudge people to ask what they want out of work and seek out new, more exhilarating pursuits.

“It might make certain things seem more meaningless than they were before,” Mr. Kelly said. “What that drives people to do is keep questioning: ‘Why am I here? What am I doing? What am I all about?’”

“Those are really difficult questions to answer, but also really important questions to ask,” he added. “The species-level identity crisis that A.I. is promoting is a good thing.”

Some scholars suggest that the crises prompted by automation could steer people toward more socially valuable work. The Dutch historian Rutger Bregman started a movement for “moral ambition” centered in the Netherlands. Groups of white-collar workers who feel that they are in meaningless jobs meet regularly to encourage one another to do something more worthwhile. (These are modeled on Sheryl Sandberg’s “Lean In” circles.) There’s also a fellowship for 24 morally ambitious people, paying them to switch into jobs specifically focused on fighting the tobacco industry or promoting sustainable meats.

“We don’t start with the question of ‘What is your passion?’” Mr. Bregman said of his moral ambition movement. “Gandalf didn’t ask Frodo ‘What’s your passion?’ He said, ‘This is what needs to get done.”

What will need to get done in the A.I era is likely to veer less toward sustainable meat and more toward oversight, at least in the immediate term. Automated jobs are especially likely to require “A.I. babysitters,” according to David Autor, an M.I.T. labor economist focused on technology and jobs. Companies will hire humans to edit the work that A.I. makes, whether legal reviews or marketing copy, and to police A.I.’s propensity to “hallucinate.” Some people will benefit, especially in jobs where there’s a tidy division of labor — A.I. handles projects that are easy and repetitive, while humans take on ones that are more complicated and variable. (Think radiology, where A.I. can interpret scans that fit into preset patterns, while humans need to tackle scans that don’t resemble dozens that the machine has seen before.)

But in many other cases, humans will end up mindlessly skimming for errors in a mountain of content made by A.I. Would that help relieve a sense of pointlessness? Overseeing drudge work doesn’t promise to be any better than doing it, or as Mr. Autor put it: “If A.I. does the work, and people babysit A.I., they’ll be bored silly.”

Some of the jobs most immediately at risk of being swallowed up by A.I. are those anchored in human empathy and connection, Mr. Autor said. That’s because machines don’t get worn out from feigning empathy. They can absorb endless customer abuse.

The new roles created for humans would be drained of that emotional difficulty — but also drained of the attendant joy. The sociologist Allison Pugh studied the effects of technology on empathic professions like therapy or chaplaincy, and concluded that “connective labor” has been degraded by the slow rollout of technology. Grocery clerks, for example, find that as automated checkout systems come to their stores, they’ve lost out on meaningful conversations with customers — which they understand managers don’t prioritize — and now are left mostly with customers exasperated about self checkout. That’s partially why Ms. Pugh fears that new jobs created by A.I. will be even more meaningless than any we have today.

Even the techno-optimists like Mr. Kelly, though, argue that there’s a certain inevitability to meaningless jobs. After all, meaninglessness, per Mr. Graeber’s definition, is in the eye of the worker.

And even beyond the realm of Mr. Graeber’s categories of pointless work, plenty of people have ambivalent relationships with their jobs. Give them enough hours and then years clocking in to do the same things, and they might start to feel frustrated: about being tiny cogs in big systems, about answering to orders that don’t make sense, about monotony. Those aggrieved feelings could crop up even as they jump into new roles, while the robot cycles spin forward, taking over some human responsibilities while creating new tasks for those who babysit the robots.

Some people will look for new roles; others might organize their workplaces, trying to remake the parts of their jobs they find most aggravating, and finding meaning in lifting up their colleagues. Some will search for broader economic solutions to the problems with work. Mr. Graeber, for example, saw universal basic income as an answer; OpenAI’s Sam Altman has also been a proponent of experiments with guaranteed income.

In other words, A.I. magnifies and complicates the social issues entwined with labor but isn’t a reset or cure-all — and while technology will transform work, it can’t displace people’s complicated feelings toward it.

Mr. Wang says he certainly believes that will hold true in Silicon Valley. He predicts that automating pointless work will mean engineers get even more creative about seeking out their promotions. “These jobs exist on selling a vision,” he said. “I fear this is one problem you can’t automate.”

Source: Will A.I. Kill Meaningless Jobs?