In a text in New Atlantis magazine’s excellent summer special focused on artificial intelligence, Brian JA Boyd warns of a coming crisis of meaning due to the automation of knowledge work in the service sector and the so-called “white collar jobs”, i.e. work that requires a business suit carries.
Many lines have already been written about the destruction of the so-called “bullshit jobs” in David Gräber’s book of the same name. In May, I recommended a text here on piqd by the science fiction author Ted Chiang, who compared the automation potential with the management consultancy McKinsey and, appropriately, economics professor Ethan Mollick published a study on the use of ChatGPT-4 in the Boston Consulting Group showed that employees who used ChatGPT worked more productively and faster than employees who did not use AI, across all dimensions measured.
David Karpf, professor of media research, comments on the study a little cynically: “Hey! I hear you think AI is a bullshit generator. Well, we gave a whole profession of bullshit generators access to AI, and you’ll never believe how much more productive they became at generating bullshit! This is such a big deal for the Future of Work!” and challenges enthusiastic AI maximalists to think more deeply about the societal impact of these automations.
That’s exactly what Brian JA Boyd did in the text I posted here and states not only a potential wave of automation for knowledge workers in all sectors, but also a loss of the human sense of the impact of one’s own ability to act – one of the essential experiences of human life: As a human being, I can make plans, put them into action and see their impact unfold.
Our life in a modern, capitalist society has already had a significant impact on this experience – key word: alienation – and the triumph of artificial intelligence, especially in administration, service and knowledge work, runs the risk of further undermining it.
Liberation from seemingly tiresome and pointless work is therefore a double-edged sword if it condemns people to a life as the executive arm of a completely automated machine and its algorithmic instructions. That’s why we should be careful about celebrating the end of the so-called bullshit jobs, as I happily did and shrugged my shoulders.
1 comment
Looks like it might be time to include another chapter in a revised version of my book, The Life-Changing Science of Detecting Bulls#!t.