AI steals the pleasure of work

A recent social media post which went viral shows a homemaker in Chennai with a camera strapped onto her head doing daily chores — folding clothes, putting wet clothes out to dry, chopping vegetables, and so on. She said she was paid up to ₹250 an hour for capturing such videos and sharing them with her employer. After a quick Internet search, I was able to confirm that this was indeed a new form of “gig work” where people do just that — attach a camera to a body part while they go about their daily chores. Their employers then use the footage to develop and train AI bots to perform such chores in “unstructured” and “chaotic” environments.

This small episode took me back in time, to an afternoon when I watched my grandmother fold a load of dry laundry I had just brought in. She took her time, sorting the clothes into neat little piles. She then proceeded to the actual folding — she seemed to have a process for each pile type and she patiently and diligently attacked the pile one item after the other. She took her time with it, but after what seemed like an hour, she produced many piles of neatly folded clothes, which were more or less wrinkle-free and ready to wear.

“Folding clothes is an art,” she told me, as I carefully took each pile to the cupboard.

Thinking back, I realised why this memory has stayed with me all these years. It was not the task itself, but the performance of it, which she made seem like an artwork. What’s more, she seemed to enjoy the process as much as I enjoyed watching it.

Coming back to today’s world, AI has become an integral part of our work and in some measure our daily lives — we have started using its help for daily tasks such as creating grocery lists or more tedious tasks such as filing tax returns or renewing our passports. At work as technocrats or developers, we use it heavily — asking it to refine or elaborate requirements, create or validate designs, generate code, review code, generate deployment files, and audit products for vulnerabilities. There’s no doubt about the possibilities AI has opened our future to and I am excited about this, as anyone else.

But, through all this, as I was recently discussing with a colleague, have we given up a major part of our joy of working? Just thinking back to the “pre-AI” age in software development, where development of a small feature used to take months, due to all the manual effort and collaboration of skilled colleagues. Yes, it was tedious and sometimes a struggle. But did we not actually enjoy the challenges and the small day-to-day wins? Every colleague who worked on a feature left their own imprint, their own original thought process, their own ideas, which would finally come together to form the finished product, much like a finished artwork. Needless to say, when such a feature was released, it was a moment of euphoria and celebration, where the whole team felt accomplished, having contributed their own unique bits. Now, with AI taking over many tasks, isn’t there a slight reduction in our collective satisfaction?

I imagine this to be the case with other professions such as writing and radiology too. Veterans and experts are sure to feel cheated of their creative right, which they spent years honing and perfecting. While studies are being conducted by reputable schools on the detrimental effects of AI on humanity’s ability to think critically, reason independently, and make sound judgments, I am worried about AI robbing us of the simple joys of working as we know them today. Experts have for long emphasised the importance of creativity and its positive effects of mental health. In our busy routines, many of us barely find the time for independent creative pursuits and rely on our jobs to channel our creative energies. By taking over many of the vital parts of the job we are used to, is AI silently killing our creativity as well? What effect is this going to have on our mental health and happiness in the long term?

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