AI has arrived with a bag of promises under its arm. It promises to eliminate the most repetitive tasks. It promises that we’ll only be tasked with the most creative work. It promises to make our lives at work much easier. It is, in short, the panacea – or something very similar.
But since we already know that not all that glitters is gold, it’s worth paying attention to the fine print. Because everything in this life has fine print, even though it’s often not advertised or even hidden.
And the fine print of AI comes in the form of a question: If you really love your job, the thing you’ll be spending a third of your life doing, why would you want a machine to do it for you?
The miracle hidden in repetitive tasks
Repetitive = Bad, undesirable, boring…
We’ve been instilled with the idea that repetitive tasks are something we should avoid at all costs. We’ve been told they’re boring. That what truly counts is creativity and novelty. But this is a biased view meant to encourage us to embrace the new without judgment, as long as it’s different. That’s why companies sell us AI as a tool that will free us from boredom so we can become creative geniuses.
However, that promise has some flaws.
The luthier who creates a violin with his own hands acquires expertise in those repetitive movements we seemingly hate so much. This artisan knows that each movement of his hands will give life to something unique, which is why he puts all his passion and effort into it.
And the same goes for the painter with each brushstroke, those layers of paint, blends of color, and strokes that are repeated thousands of times. Or the writer with each word he writes, erasing or correcting until he achieves the perfect phrase. And the same goes for the dancer who spends hours repeating the same sequence of steps, or the chef who prepares a recipe a thousand times until he achieves the perfect combination of flavors.
When you love your job, you don’t just want to have the idea, you also want to put it into practice. You want to get your hands dirty. And that usually requires repeating something a thousand times.
If you despair after making the thousandth stitch, you don’t like knitting. If you hate writing the umpteenth line of code, you don’t like programming. If you tire of rereading and rewriting the same paragraph ten times, you don’t like writing. Because when you’re truly passionate about something, you also enjoy the process.
If you only correct an algorithm, you no longer create: vegetate
Passion doesn’t discriminate between outcome and process. When you’re passionate about something, you enjoy the journey of creation as much as the outcome. You enjoy every stitch you weave, every brushstroke, every word, every movement… Because in that repetition, the magic happens, and you enter the “flow” described by Mihály Csikszentmiháyi, a state in which the hours fly by and you lose awareness of yourself because you’re completely absorbed by what you’re doing.
Becoming a mere order-giver or supervisor of what the machine does eliminates much of that process and standardizes the result. It turns you into that factory worker who presses a button and spends all day overseeing that the assembly line runs as it should. You may take home a salary, but satisfaction is a different story.
If all your work is limited to supervising an algorithm, what you gain in efficiency you’ll lose in life satisfaction. Because as humans, we need to create and immerse ourselves fully in that process. What the market calls “inefficiency” is actually humanity.
So, if you’re using AI in your job to avoid getting your hands dirty, you’d better change jobs. Not because AI will take your job – something that’s also likely if we stop valuing the human – but because it has already rendered it meaningless. The real risk isn’t unemployment, it’s alienation.
The real question isn’t whether AI will replace you at work, but whether you’ve already replaced yourself. And the answer is simple: if you only aspire to supervise a machine, what you need isn’t more AI, but another job that truly fulfills you.
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