What if we get AI to do all the boring stuff?

Recently I’ve been thinking boring thoughts. It’s surprisingly interesting.

I’ve mostly been thinking about the threat posed by AI’s elimination of the mundane and the menial, the boring work that humans often do badly and machines can (possibly) do well.

The replacement of menial data-entry jobs and flabby middle-management by efficient systems sounds great. But it risks hollowing out workplaces, eliminating the entry-level positions that give young workers the experience that develops the wisdom that enables them to do the ‘higher-level’ work that AI supposedly creates the space for.

And this is what really concerns me: that outsourcing the mundane and the menial to AI will lead to the gutting of our interior landscapes, stripping out the cognitive furniture that makes the imaginative, creative and personal possible.

As I think about my brief medical career—and my wife’s much longer nursing career—there was a lot of boring work. Learning anatomy and physiology and drug-interactions. Taking patient histories and doing routine physical examinations. Checking blood results and ECGs and patient charts. Sitting with patients in clinics and on the wards.

Machines can do much of that much better. But it’s those hours of tedium that slowly built the technical and interpersonal knowledge and skills that make for a good practitioner. The capacity to form a judgement that something is ‘off’ with this patient—something the machines don’t yet show. This is the kind of judgement that ICU nurses make day after day and on which the specialists and those they care for depend. Judgement shaped by the boring and the tedious.

It’s the menial and the mundane, not the interesting and creative, that shapes the intuitions and forms the character on which we depend. Such are the virtues of boredom.

This Thinking Out Loud was first published on Facebook.