We can farm out a lot of unproductive bureaucratic busywork to AI, freeing up the people who now hold those jobs to engage in productive labor. From Charles Hugh Smith at oftwominds.com:
A truly intelligent AI would refuse to do such transparently stupid, needless counter-productive BS Work.
So here’s the good news about AI: it can now do more BS work, author David Graeber’s term for the meaningless churning of bureaucratic “work” that lost its purpose and functionality long ago but is now considered “essential” to the operation of a system in which complexity and self-interest are the masters rather than tools to radically improve efficiency.
If we ask, what real-world tasks now take 90% less time, energy, effort and money to complete, the list boils down to marginal ephemera: now my online search for cute kittens is faster and better than ever! Now AI can conjure a look-alike commercial of cute kittens, a “product” whose novelty value wore off months ago.
Coding BS work got faster and easier, which means the load of BS work demanded can rise accordingly.
If we ask, what real-world tasks now take more time, energy, effort and money to complete, the list is long. Consider the accounting and filing of taxes, an enormous industry of self-serving bureaucracies: politicians need to tweak the tax code to foster the illusion they’re serving a constituency they need to get re-elected and their campaign-contribution donors, a vast army of accountants, tax lawyers, etc. need this churn to justify their essential role in the process, and a vast regulatory system of state, local and federal agencies needs the churn to justify their ever-increasing payrolls to codify, publicize, monitor compliance and enforce the constant tweaks in the tax codes.
Adjusted for inflation and calculated as a percentage of GDP, tax receipts are remarkably stable. Tax revenues noodle around in a fairly narrow band, and so what’s the systemic value-added proposition in constantly tweaking the tax code? There is none.
The entire exercise is a self-serving theater of the absurd which ultimately boils down to this: we have so much money sloshing around that we can siphon off staggering sums under the pretense of doing “essential work” that is actually unproductive or counter-productive BS work.
Always looking on the bright side is CHS.
Diversity is our strength, it’s got electrolytes.
I nominate Katy Perry for historic Brawndo czar!
AI be all smart n’ stuff.
Honk, honk.