The list of potential victims of artificial intelligence is long. It includes every business, all software engineers, privacy and humanity itself. But some of its expected effects are more popular than others. Most people can agree, for example, that AI will be doing workers a tremendous favour if it gets rid of grunt work, the sort of tediously repetitive tasks that take up too much of everyone's days. Filling out expense claims, copying and pasting things into spreadsheets, trying to resize one of those stupid boxes in PowerPoint — if people were able to outsource this drudgery to machines, they could devote more attention to higher-value tasks.
The case against grunt work is obvious. Health-care workers spend inordinate amounts of time manually inputting data, time that could be spent actually looking after patients. Automated redaction technology can spare police officers the hours they currently spend stripping personal information from documents and videos. In office after office the mundane and the routine get in the way of people doing more valuable tasks.
Greater productivity would not be the only prize from less drudgery. People do not like being bored out of their skulls, and will do whatever they can to liven things up. In one study, people who were shown a tedious film were more likely than watchers of an interesting one to put maggots through what they thought was a coffee grinder. "End ennui, maggots matter!" is surely a slogan everyone can get behind.
Yet there is always another side to the ledger. Reducing drudge work is indeed a noble aim. Getting rid of it entirely is much less sensible.
One argument for drudge work is its centrality to entry-level jobs. People who are new to the workforce know very little about the job they are meant to be doing. (The same is also true for lots of people at the end of their careers, but that's a different column.) Grunt work has long been a way to fill junior employees' time while allowing them to learn the basics of office life. Per photocopier ad astra. If ai takes on all the drudge work that has traditionally fallen to the newbies, employers may simply stop hiring them.
The obvious answer to that worry is to get younger employees to do higher-value tasks sooner. Law firms talk of putting juniors in front of clients earlier in their careers, for example. But the goal of filling working days with nothing but higher-order tasks is misconceived. Because even experienced workers need a chance to move up and down through the gears.
That's partly because of cognitive capacity. It's hard to imagine many jobs where optimal performance matters more than being an air-traffic controller. Under-stimulation is a definite risk: controllers have been known to combine sectors of airspace into bigger blocks if traffic volumes are too low. But there is also a limit to how long people can concentrate deeply without becoming fatigued, which is why controllers typically work no more than 90 minutes or two hours without taking a break. Too much boredom is a bad thing, in other words, but so is too little.
Tasks that don't require laser-like focus can also allow creative ideas to incubate. A study by Benjamin Baird of the University of Texas at Austin and his co-authors asked participants to take a standard creativity test, in which they had to think of as many novel uses as possible for an ordinary object. A subset of this group was then given an undemanding task to do before taking the test again; other subsets were given a demanding task, a period of rest or no break at all. People who were given a task where their minds could wander far outperformed the other groups on the subsequent test.
Counterintuitively, grunt work may even be useful for bestowing a sense of agency. People like completing tasks. In a study of emergency-room doctors in an American hospital, Diwas KC of Emory University and his co-authors found that physicians would deliberately prioritise easier-to-complete tasks as workloads increased. Much as nobody revels in doing their expenses, they can at least be done. You can press the submit button and feel minutely satisfied (until you are told the claim code is wrong).
A job comprising too much drudgery is mind-numbing. If AI can make work more stimulating and more productive, then the technology will deserve plaudits. But bosses and employees should not be too quick to wish away every last bit of toil. Puttering has its place.