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.

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.