Thesis: Interesting work is less amenable to the use of AI

My thesis is actually simpler. For the longest time until the Industrial Revolution humans have done uninteresting work for the large part. There was a routine and little else. Intellectuals worked through a very terse knowledge base and it was handed down master to apprentice. Post renaissance and industrial age the amount of known knowledge has exploded, the specializations have exploded. Most of what white collar work is today is managing and searching through this explosion of knowledge and rules. AI (well the LLM part) is mostly targeted towards that - making that automated. That’s all it is. Here is the problem though, it’s for the clueless. Those who are truly clueless fall victim to the hallucinations. Those who have expertise in their field will be able to be more efficient.

AI isn’t replacing innovation or original thought. It is just working off an existing body of knowledge.

I disagree that ancient work was uninteresting. If you've ever looked at truly old architecture, walls, carvings etc you can see that people really took pride in their work, adding things that absolutely weren't just pure utility. In my mind that's the sign of someone that considers their work interesting.

But in general, in the past there was much less specialization. That means each individual was responsible for a lot more stuff, and likely had a lot more varied work day. The apprentice blacksmith didn't just hammer out nail after nail all day with no breaks. They made all sorts of tools, cutlery, horseshoes. But they also carried water, operated bellows, went to fetch coke etc, sometimes even spending days without actually hammering metal at all - freeing up mental energy and separation to be able to enjoy it when they actually got to do it.

Similarly, farm laborers had massively varied lives. Their daily tasks of a given week or month would look totally different depending on the season, with winter essentially being time off to go fix or make other stuff because you can't do much more than wait to make plants grow faster

People might make the criticism and say "oh but that was only for rich people/government" etc, but look at for example old street lights, bollards etc. Old works tend to be

Specialization allows us to curse ourselves with efficiency, and a curse it is indeed. Now if you're good at hammering nails, nails are all you'll get, morning to night, and rewarded the shittier and cheaper and faster you make your nails, sucking all incentive to do any more than the minimum

Hunter–gatherers have incredible knowledge and awareness about their local environment – local flora and fauna, survival skills, making and fixing shelters by hand, carpentry, pottery, hunting, cooking, childcare, traditional medicine, stories transmitted orally, singing or music played on relatively simple instruments, hand-to-hand combat, and so on – but live in relatively small groups and are necessarily generalists. The rise of agriculture and later writing made most people into peasant farmers, typically disempowered if not enslaved (still with a wide range of skills and deep knowledge), and led to increasing specialization (scribes, artisans, merchants, professional soldiers, etc.).

Calling this various work "uninteresting" mostly reflects on your preferences rather than the folks who were doing the work. A lot of the work was repetitive, but the same is true of most jobs today. That didn't stop many people from thinking about something else while they worked.

I would say that mastering things like building, farming, gardening, hunting, blacksmithing and cooking does require quite a bit of learning. Before industrial revolution most people engaged in many or all of those activities, and I believe they were more intellectually stimulated than your average office worker today.

> Those who have expertise in their field will be able to be more efficient.

My problem with it as a scientist is that I can't trust a word it writes until I've checked everything 10 times over. Checking over everything was always the hardest part of my job. Subtle inconsistencies can lead to embarrassing retractions or worse. So the easy part is now automatic, and the hard part is 10x harder, because it will introduce mistakes in ways I wouldn't normally do, and therefore it's like I've got somebody working against me the whole time.

Yes, this is exactly how I feel about AI generating code as well.

Reviewing code is way harder than writing it, for me. Building a mental model of what I want to build, then building that comes very naturally to me, but building a mental model of what someone else made is much more difficult and slow for me

Feeling like it is working against me instead of with me is exactly the right way to describe it