AI vs. BS

There is a creeping suspicion about the nature of much modern white-collar work. A proliferation of roles that seem to involve the elaborate administration of… well, more administration. It’s a phenomenon the anarchist anthropologist and organizer of Occupy Wall Street David Graeber famously tagged as ”bullshit jobs” – tasks so seemingly pointless that even those performing them often struggle to justify their existence.

This isn't just an economic quirk; it's a cultural and societal symptom that ties directly into the quiet hollowing out of meaning in our developed, comfortable lives (ie. ”the quotidian knockout” as I named it in my previous piece). While much of these jobs are in the private sector, their proliferation—a growth much less by design than by inertia—is coupled with the growth of the (welfare) state and regulations. They have created a vast ecosystem of roles dedicated to navigating the unnecessary complexity, ensuring compliance with convoluted rules, and maintaining the internal machinery of managerialist organizations, those ”Junkyards of Unmade Decisions” (again, a reference to an earlier writing).

Enter Artificial Intelligence. The usual narrative casts AI as the villain, the stealer of livelihoods. But what if, in certain quarters, AI is not the disease but an unexpected, somewhat brutal, form of medicine? What if the roles it’s poised to make redundant are precisely those that shouldn't have existed in such abundance in the first place: those mostly unfulfilling, managerialist, and bureaucratically-oriented jobs?

AI is a supremely efficient tool driven by mathematical innovation. Its current prowess lies in processing information, automating administrative tasks, generating reports, and even performing sophisticated pattern analysis – the very bedrock of many of these potentially “bullshit jobs.” AI doesn't ask for a budget increase for its department, nor does it engage in office politics to justify its continued employment. It simply, and ruthlessly, exposes redundancy by offering a more efficient way.

This isn't merely about technological disruption. It’s about an arguably necessary correction. If AI can dismantle layers of bureaucratic and managerialist mid-wit chaff, it challenges the ”surrender of the mind” that has allowed such structures to persist and expand unchallenged. It forces a confrontation with what constitutes real value versus performative activity.

The discomfort that some of us feel about AI taking jobs might, in part, be the discomfort of having the curtain pulled back on systemic absurdities they’ve tacitly accepted.

Of course, any large-scale job displacement brings with it genuine human concerns and anxieties that should not be dismissed lightly. The transition will cause pain. Yet, the larger, systemic question remains: does a society become healthier by pruning roles that were, in essence, byproducts of its own inefficiencies and over-complications?

The proliferation of “bullshit jobs” is a symptom of a system that has, perhaps, valued the appearance of activity over actual productivity, compliance over common sense. AI, in its current state, is a mirror reflecting this. The challenge, then, isn't just how we cope with AI, but whether we have the courage to acknowledge what it's showing us about the structures we've built. Will this technological force inadvertently nudge us towards a more rational allocation of human talent and purpose, or will we simply find new, some mindblowingly byzantine ways to administer the AI itself?

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