Why Boring AI is Driving Adoption

0:00Today on the AI Breakdown, we are discussing boring AI. The AI Breakdown is a daily podcast and video about the most important news and discussions in AI. Go to Breakdown.network for more information about our YouTube, our Discord, and our newsletter.

0:24Hello, friends. It is time for another AI long read, and this, once again, comes from Professor Ethan Malek. His piece is called In Praise of Boring AI, and it basically discusses how much value there is in simply automating away basic silly little things. Let's read a selection from the piece, and then we'll come back and discuss. Also note, this will be 11 labs me reading, so if I sound a little bit off or mispronounce things, you know why. We spend a lot of time discussing the aspects of AI that are, for better or worse, exciting. The idea that super-intelligent AIs may one day murder or save us all.

0:55Certainly not dull. The ways AI might displace our jobs or transform education. Interesting. But today, I want to cover the boring aspects of AI. As context, one of the first major experimental papers on the impact of ChatGPT on work just came out in Science, based on the free working paper here, and the results are pretty impressive. In realistic business writing tasks, ChatGPT decreased the time required for work by 40%, even as outside evaluators rated the quality of work written with the help of AI to be 18 % better than the ones done by humans alone. When after using it, people were more worried about their jobs, but also significantly happier.

1:28Why? Because a lot of work is boring, and AI did the boring stuff fast. This isn't new. Automation has always been about eliminating work that is repetitive and often dangerous or boring. Think of the factory worker soldering cans for 8 hours a day, the miner digging with a pick, or the job that most typifies boring and dangerous. The man who sat on a one-legged stool in Alfred Nobel's Scottish dynamite factory, watching the thermometer to make sure that the TNT didn't explode. The surroundings are rather trying to sensitive nerves. Your life depends at every moment upon a thermometer and a man on a one-legged stool.

1:58We developed automatic can-soldering equipment, mining machines, and automatic temperature controls then transformed all of these jobs. As opposed to these previous waves of automation, AI isn't purpose-built to replace any task in particular. Instead, it does a lot of things, some better than others. And this is well-suited to making many of our lives better in some narrow but important ways because it allows us to automate tasks. Scholars studying work often conceive of jobs as a bundle of tasks. Take my role as a business school professor. My job isn't just a single, indivisible entity. Instead, it comprises a variety of tasks.

2:32Teaching, researching, writing, filling out annual reports, maintaining my computer, writing letters of recommendation, and more. The job title professor is just a label. The daily experience consists of this mix of tasks. What tasks are involved in my job is somewhat arbitrary. Professors at other schools may have different tasks, but these are mine. Many of them are boring and important. Writing letter of recommendation is an honor and an important one, but not a lot of fun. And I have written about the risks of automating those tasks before, but a lot of boring work is just tedious and is not worthy of deep focus.

3:03In an ideal world, we wouldn't do this stuff at all. In our less ideal world, AI can do it for us. While not all work has to be thrilling, a huge amount of it is boring for no reason. And that seems to be a big problem. Not only is boredom a top cause for people leaving companies, but we do crazy stuff when bored. One small study of undergraduates found that 66 % of men and a quarter of women choose to painfully shock themselves rather than sit quietly with nothing to do for 15 minutes. And in a set of pre-registered studies of 7 ,000 people, boredom was linked to sadism. For example, 18 % of bored people killed worms when given a chance, only 2 % of non-bored people did, and bored parents and soldiers both act more sadistically.

3:41Boredom is dangerous in its own way, so it is odd that we let so much of work become boring. In surveys, people report being bored about 10 hours a week at work. In an ideal world, managers would spend time trying to end the useless and repetitive work that leads to boredom, and to adjust work to focus on the more engaging tasks. But despite years of management advice, most official rituals, forms, and requirements persist long past their usefulness. If humans couldn't end this tedious work, the machines can. Thus, if we want to think about the first work we truly give to AIs, maybe we should start the way every other automation wave has started, with the tedious, mentally dangerous, and repetitive.

4:17Companies and organizations could start with thinking about how to make boring processes AI-friendly, allowing machines with human supervision to fill our required forms. Rewarding workers for slaying boring tasks with AI could also help streamline operations while making everyone happier. And if this sheds light on tasks that could be safely automated with no decrease in value, so much the better. Maybe that is work that can be eliminated. As I have written before, AI is going to have many effects, good and bad, and a lot will depend on how we decide to use it. One way to start us on a positive path is to begin by thinking about ways that AI can help us flourish by automating what holds us back.

4:51For many people, a quarter of their working life is tedious. Changing that is a good first step, and establishes a precedent of using AI as a way to free ourselves from drudgery, allowing us to focus on what matters. Alright, back to non-AI NLW again, and I just want to talk about this for a couple of minutes. Something I am thinking about a lot right now is where and how people are actually using AI. You guys know that I've been running now since December, so for a few months, this AI education beta. It's organized around tutorials that are meant to be much more practical, hands-on, stuff that you can actually put into practice very quickly.

5:25And it's been a really interesting context to see what's super useful for people. There's actually a little bit of a disparity between what people are attracted to checking out and what people actually use. So in terms of what people are excited about, it's of course things like no-code builders and text-to-UI. Some of these applications would show what the future of AI might really be, where humans can reimagine themselves as being able to create way more than they can create now. On the flip side, though, when it comes to the things that I hear that they actually put into practice, it's way more basic stuff.

5:56It really is these small, simple systems that automate away or just simplify certain tasks that took them more time before. A great example for me, sure, I can use MidJourney to imagine my children's dreams and create entire worlds and stories, But what I use it for day in and day out is just stupid YouTube and newsletter thumbnails. And each time I do that, it saves me not hours, but certainly minutes that add up to an hour. Compounded over time, that's an incredible benefit. One of the things that you might see right now, and I think you're going to see more of in the next couple months, is an attempt to push AI narratively into some sort of trough of disillusionment following the peak of inflated expectations.

6:35This is, of course, the standard Gardner hype cycle, where there's always a sense with new technologies that the hype gets out ahead of it and it has to come back to Earth. Now, I'm not saying that there won't be a little bit of a comeback to Earth energy for AI, but I think what people are failing to realize is that even if what people thought they were going to use AI for is different than what they're actually using it for, what makes this different than other technology changes that we've experienced is that once you've started integrating these things into your systems, you are just simply never going back, are never not going to use a co-pilot when they code ever again, period, full stop.

7:09Designers who make YouTube thumbnails or newsletter thumbnails or collateral for paid ads are never going to go back to not using AI. Copywriters are never going to go back to not using AI to check their work or to brainstorm. And so even if we don't have thousands of agents deployed across the web, taking care of every whim that we can imagine, that doesn't mean that AI isn't having an impact and frankly, a dramatically faster impact than technologies in the past. It's just, to use Ethan's terms, a little bit more boring than we might have expected. I would highly caution you, however, from underestimating it.

7:44Certainly I am not. And by way of teaser, that's why I'm very excited for the beginning of April and an exciting announcement that's coming soon. Keep your eyes for that. And for now, appreciate you listening. Until next time, peace.

8:02Thank you.