One of these things is not like the other.
But, they both shine a light on how AI has changed lives in the short time it’s been available to a wide audience.
It can and has made huge leaps for people who apply it correctly to work they are engaged in.
It has also created a crutch for bored, lazy, disengaged workers doing bullshit jobs, highlighting how meaningless work in the modern office is.
Huge numbers of people have jobs that don’t matter and that they do not care about. In this situation, AI is merely a tool that allows disengaged workers to do less.
These workers and the bullshit jobs they do have been written about by David Bolchover in the Living Dead, Dan Davies in The Unaccountability Machine, and Phil Mullen in Creative Destruction.
What can we do about them? Is there a fix? Not an obvious one, but an entire societal attitude shift may help.
Stories of people who do fuck all, and use AI to perpetuate their achievement of fuck all abound. The free chatbots released in the past two years are built to enable many workers in large organisations and nice offices to do as little as possible and still earn a steady salary.
Wrangling with this is a concern, but until the prevailing attitude of government and large organisation towards work changes, it will be difficult.
Specific, targeted use of AI, such as achieved by Demis Hassabis and his team in winning the Nobel Prize in 2024, will get a lot of praise, but the fact is that the use of AI to perform tasks like this takes something lacking in the wider workforce. Motivation and engagement.
The simple fact that AI is praised by many as the ticket to a work-free life says it all.
No past revolution, industrial or technological, has been praised as a way for humanity to put its collective feet up. Marx did say this, but even he thought we’d have to do a bit of graft in the morning before we bunked off at lunchtime.
Technological revolutions create wealth and prosperity because they allow people to create more with the resources they have. These resources can be material (think how much more productive farmland is now compared to 50 years ago) or time. Mechanisation of manufacturing tasks increases the time available to either make more products or develop others.
In other words, progress wasn’t done in the name of doing less, it was done with the aim of creating more and doing more.
AI hasn’t been able to achieve this on any sort of broad scale yet and as long as bullshit, unengaging, administrative jobs exist and are done by huge numbers of people. It’s unlikely it will revolutionise anything.
The future will belong to those who give a shit. An AI tool used to annotate an email about the latest internal employee engagement report doth not a revolution make.
Macro Aggressions 
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