In praise of boredom
AI is coming for your boring tasks, leaving nothing for you.
Please note: This week’s article is going to be shorter than usual for 2 reasons.
Reason #1- I am working on a longer piece that requires some degree of research and collaboration, and meetings with people in different parts of the world. Time zones get in the way when you’re planning meetings with people on the other side of the world (literally). Expect that to be published on August 22nd. 📆
Reason #2- I am getting ready for a well-deserved vacation, starting in a couple of days, so I am trying to wrap everything up so I can go rest on a beach somewhere, smothered in sunscreen, mojito in hand. ⛱️
Also, in consonance with my upcoming vacation, this is likely to be a more contemplative piece that reflects my relaxed state of mind.
On to this week’s topic
Over the past week, I read two very interesting articles about the impact of AI on the future of work (I read many articles, but these 2 stand out).
Thinking vs Thunking
The first one of these was a wonderful piece by Cassie Kozyrkov, Chief Decision Scientist at Google and probably my favorite person in the Data Science space. She publishes wonderful material frequently, including a highly recommended, 6+ hour course called “Making Friends with Machine Learning”, that provides a wonderful introduction to many data science topics.
She recently publish an article titled “Thunking vs Thinking: Whose Job Does AI Automate?“ where she defines 2 essential categories of jobs, with Thinking being the interesting, meaty, creative, and innately human tasks, and Thunking being the repetitive, boring, mindless work that populates a good portion of our days, at work and outside of it. She argues that AI is well poised to rid us of the burden of “thunking”.
In praise of boring AI
The second article was an equally insightful piece by Ethan Mollick, Associate Professor at The Wharton School and a huge advocate of embracing AI in Education. He is currently working on a series of videos aimed at educators and students and focused on how to make AI a productive part of the learning journey, rather than a threat that needs to be banned. Check out the first video in that course here.
His article is titled “In praise of boring AI”, and it describes how we have always been trying to automate/simplify our work and get rid of tedious tasks. This is not new, this is just the evolved version of it, and he offers some practical examples of things he automated.
In praise of boredom
Both of these articles, and especially the second one, made me think of the wonderful essay “In praise of boredom“, by Joseph Brodsky. Written in times prior to internet and cellular phones (it was a speech addressed to the graduates of Dartmouth, in 1989), it describes how boredom is innately human and -while universally despised- a necessary part of life and an opportunity to experience “…pure, undiluted time, in all its repetitive, redundant, monotonous splendor.”
“The reason boredom deserves such scrutiny is that it represents pure, undiluted time in all its repetitive, redundant, monotonous splendor.”
And he goes on to attest to the importance of boredom in perceiving our own minuscule size again the infinity of the universe:
“In a manner of speaking, boredom is your window on time, on those properties of it one tends to ignore to the likely peril of one’s mental equilibrium. In short, it is your window on time’s infinity, which is to say, on your insignificance in it.”
Contrasting the 2 articles cited before with Brodsky’s essay, a cautionary tale emerges:
In our worthwhile effort to reduce the burden of unnecessary boring tasks, we need to make sure that, by employing AI to automate the boring parts we do not want to do, we take care not to miss the essence of what makes us human, and the germ of creativity that comes with boredom.
Just like the character from “The Magic Thread” tale that keeps the thread out of curiosity and anticipation, only to discover that -in doing that- he has missed his life (or you maybe you are more familiar Adam Sandler’s adaptation “Click” where the thread is replaced with a remote control), let’s make sure that by letting AI do “all the boring stuff”, we do not lose the opportunity to find ourselves in the sometimes necessary boredom.
Just like tending a Zen garden, just like Daniel-San waxing-on/waxing-off, sometimes we need these contemplative moments of routine to turn off the voices and just be present in the moment.
And now, if you excuse me, I’m going to be bored for a week and recharge my batteries so I can return energized and continue to be amazed by innovation.