Will This Be The Year We Run Out Of Mundane Tasks?
The Promise Of Advanced Technology That Pushes Us Forward
The promise is simple. It’s as old as the idea of progress itself: a new technology helps us reduce or eliminate a mundane task. We’ve seen it time and again and benefit from innovations, large and small, in all aspects of our lives — as consumers and professionals. What’s interesting, though, is that what is deemed mundane changes as the level of automation increases and technology evolves. Most recently, we have seen the promise of reducing mundane tasks with the help of AI and Automation. But does it mean we are eliminating all mundane tasks in a business?
When Mundane Tasks Are Automated
Historically, new technologies have helped automate tasks that have been viewed as mundane, repetitive, or non-value-adding:
Switchboard operation
Interoffice mail
Data entry
When tasks like these no longer need to be executed by a person, it leads to two consequences:
The next set of higher-level tasks will now be mundane
Introducing automation creates a new set of tasks that are mundane again
Let’s take the example of managing and maintaining the new systems that automate new parts of the labor. It’s a substitution and shift of mundane tasks. The early days of Robotic Process Automation (RPA) have seen a shift of labor from subject matter experts in the business (e.g., to create and upload spreadsheets to a business application) towards IT and Centers of Excellence (CoE) who have created and have had to maintain the software that now automates that task.
But let’s take a more general task: writing, for example. Once upon a time, writing was limited to monks and aristocrats. It was viewed as an expression of thought and intellect. But writing (and publishing) have significantly evolved over the past several hundred years. The most significant impact has happened within the past 100 years, given the compounding effects of technological progress, from writing with a feather to the printing press, typewriter, and computer.
How Generative AI Creates New Mundane Tasks
The latest technology innovation, Generative AI, enables us to develop systems that create new information on our behalf in real-time. But unless you know how to instruct (prompt) the Generative AI model, the results will be pretty bland or even plain wrong.
Yes, humans can successfully delegate the task of writing to the AI. But this comes at a cost: the cost of reviewing and editing. And this might cost as much time as writing it yourself. Soon enough, reviewing and editing will be a mundane task as well.
Additional improvements in the models and feeding them enough data about you and your writing style might improve the quality of the first draft and make manual reviews obsolete. Again, it is one less mundane task to worry about. But at the same time, new tasks are created, and a familiar pattern repeats itself.
As new technologies are introduced, we tend to forget that these tasks used to be accomplished differently. It’s what you hear your kids say when you visit a museum: » Have people really ever lived/ worked/ done it like that? «
What To Expect From Generative AI In 2024
In 2023, we have seen many examples where Generative AI can reduce the amount of mundane tasks. Writing product descriptions, social & blog posts, and e-mails, or creating stock images, synthetic voices, and short videos.
This year, we will see many of those innovations become commercially available and adopted — and the focus will shift from creating to reviewing and from operating to observing.
So, will this be the year we will run out of mundane tasks? — Probably not. But with every new technology and innovation, we are getting a little closer to eliminating mundane tasks once and for all.
Happy New Year and happy next-level mundane tasks!
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