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ZDNET’s key takeaways
- Tech companies promote AI as a means of eliminating “busywork.”
- Moderate amounts of boredom, however, can be fruitful.
- Also, humans can’t be expected to be constantly productive.
One of the most pervasive marketing tropes pushed by AI companies in recent years has been a promise to eliminate “busywork.” Once we’ve been liberated from the burden of mundane tasks, we’ll be free to think big thoughts, pursue our most cherished goals, and build deeper human connections. That sales pitch implies that within every human being there’s a wellspring of creativity, and that stretches of boredom and monotony at work are a dam that blocks us from tapping into it. Monotony gets stigmatized as the enemy of insight.
But as is almost always the case with new technologies, reality is proving to be more nuanced than AI companies’ marketing departments would have us believe. It turns out that occasional boredom might not be such a bad thing, and that asking employees to constantly focus on cognitively engaging tasks could, in the long run, be counterproductive.
Inspiration needs breathing room
Most of us at one point or another have experienced a “lightbulb” moment: a flash of illumination, when the pieces of a mental puzzle we’ve long been trying to solve suddenly fall into place. It’s often precisely when we take a break from trying to solve a problem that the solution reveals itself.
To take that step back, we need cognitive breathing room. That can come in the form of physically walking away from one’s work and seeking solitude. Bill Gates, for example, famously embarks on “think weeks” twice a year to read in a secluded cabin in the Pacific Northwest. Both Albert Einstein and Charles Darwin were staunch believers in the value of daily walks.
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But insight can also occur when the mind is ambiently preoccupied with an easy and repetitive task — what’s derisively come to be known as busywork. Handing over these tasks to AI can speed up some operations in the workplace, but at what cost?
“A large number of our best product ideas have come from engineers doing the same repetitive data validation work over and over again, where they notice patterns that would lead to larger insight,” Lacey Kaelani-Dahan, founder of software company Metaintro, told ZDNET. “However, once we eliminated that repetitive task and automated it, we definitely improved automation, but we lost the incidental learning that happens [through] seeing the data.”
Kaelani-Dahan’s example illustrates a subtle truth that many of us have directly experienced, but that gets overlooked in the AI industry’s stigmatization of busywork: boredom can sometimes be a fertile ground where new ideas can germinate.
The value of boredom
Obviously, too much boredom isn’t a good thing. If you’re feeling chronically unengaged at your job, it’s probably time to start looking for a new one. A little bit of boredom, however, can go a long way.
A study published in the journal Scientific Reports in October analyzed brain activity periods of boredom and found that, rather than simply flat-lining, it was manifesting in new patterns.
“While prolonged or unmanaged boredom can impair attention and motivation, our results suggest that brief episodes of boredom may trigger cognitive reorganization, enabling learners to re-engage with material more deeply,” the authors wrote.
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Other recent research has shown that letting one’s thoughts freely wander, as opposed to focusing them on the completion of a particular task, can boost creativity.
Again, none of this is to say that we should all be kicking back and letting our thoughts drift aimlessly all the time. But the data does point to the idea that boredom in small doses can, counterintuitively, ultimately be more productive than forcing ourselves to work flat-out all the time.
Automation doesn’t necessarily mean an end to boredom and busywork, though. It can free up time in the day by handling routine tasks, and one can always choose to fill that space with time devoted to casually thinking about a problem, rather than trying to actively solve it. Here, too, the key point to emphasize is a balance between downtime and action.
“AI should give people more control over how they spend cognitive energy instead of removing it,” said Bernard Meyer, AI operations manager at software company Omnisend. “But that requires discipline.”
‘AI should not turn the workday into a nonstop sprint’
Another central problem with the AI industry’s sales pitch is that even the most productive, disciplined workers can’t sustain intensely focused work indefinitely. We all have creative peaks and valleys over the course of a day; the trick is for each of us to get to know our own particular cognitive rhythms and learn to work with them.
To believe that we can simply offload busywork onto AI and perpetually focus on more cognitively demanding work is to misunderstand our own minds.
“I suspect that if we optimized entirely for highly cognitive work, we’d run into diminishing returns on quality,” said Shawn Spooner, global chief technology officer at advertising agency Billups. “A better paradigm would be to aim to keep our folks in flow state for a few multi-hour blocks each day, where they are the most productive and the most happy, stitched together with more mundane tasks to give their day a more natural ebb and flow.”
Also: 3 ways anyone can start using AI at work today – safely
Debra Andrews, president of consulting firm Marketri, echoed that idea that the optimal workday is one that harmonizes hyper-focused productivity with relaxed downtime.
“There’s a risk in assuming that every recovered minute should be filled with more high-intensity work,” she said. “If teams are constantly pushed from one cognitively demanding task to the next, creativity and strategic clarity actually suffer … AI should not turn the workday into a nonstop sprint, [but] rather create a better rhythm.”
An overreliance on AI tools in the workplace also raises the risk of creating a fractured, lonely workplace.
Research from the freelance platform Upwork has shown, for example, that employees who routinely use AI at work are more likely to feel disconnected from their colleagues, heightening the chances that they’ll burn out and start seeking another job. Another study published last spring found that the use of generative AI tools in the workplace can enhance employee performance, but it also saps their motivation.
Bottom line
AI companies are locked in a heated competition to weave their respective models into the daily routines of as many people as possible. There’s a growing sense that whoever dominates the AI market — as Google has reigned over online search, Amazon over e-commerce, and Apple over smartphones — will dominate the next evolutionary stage of the entire global tech industry. The stakes are therefore extremely high, both financially and geopolitically.
In their haste to win over new customers, tech companies are prone to taking a short-range view. They release chatbots into the wild that are designed to maximize user engagement over well-being, for example. Similarly, in their efforts to automate busywork and eliminate boredom, they could unintentionally be cutting us off from the actual source of the very creativity and inspiration they promise to deliver.
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