What Has AI Revealed Was a Waste of Time?
What Has AI Revealed Was a Waste of Time? The machine did not devalue work. It exposed work that was never where the value lived. Framing the Question AI busywork is becoming easier to see because the machine is fast at the very things many workplaces quietly rewarded: producing an acceptable first draft, restating available information, filling templates, and making routine communication look finished. The question is uncomfortable because time spent is often mistaken for value created. When a tool compresses an hour into a minute, it does not prove that the person was useless. It asks whether the hour had been spent on the right part of the job. The Direct Answer: Work That Only Imitated Value AI has made one category of work especially hard to defend: predictable production performed as though production itself were expertise . That includes writing the fifth variation of a standard customer reply, converting meeting notes into a familiar summary, manually reformatting information a...