LESSON 13
Bullshit Machines for Bullshit Work
Developed by Carl T. Bergstrom and Jevin D. West
As professors, we have the joy of following our curiosity and making new discoveries about the world—but we also spend a lot of time writing progress reports that no one will read, taking mandatory trainings for systems we will never use, attending meetings with vague or non-existent purpose, and drafting anodyne documents of minimal consequence simply so that someone can report that they were written.
It's not unique to our job, of course. From automated phone trees to two-factor authentication, from battling online travel sites for a refund to navigating the ever-changing interfaces of the apps we rely on, living in the 21st century means dealing with inefficient, time-consuming systems on a daily basis.
These activities are akin to what social theorist David Graeber describes as bullshit jobs: tasks that are considered pointless, unnecessary, and devoid of meaning by even those who do them. Sadly, the world is full of bullshit work demanded by the bureaucracies we have created around ourselves.
In the short term, we suspect that bullshit machines can take a lot of this bullshit work off our hands. We would probably be better off not doing that work at all, but handing it off to a machine seems like a good start.
In the long term, it's less clear whether LLMs lead to more bullshit work or less. To explain, we first need to look at why bullshit work exists in the first place.
Labour, to be attractive, must be directed towards some obviously useful end...
Huge swathes of people, in Europe and North America in particular, spend their entire working lives performing tasks they secretly believe do not really need to be performed.
A good fraction of bullshit work involves creating or overcoming frictions—obstacles that slow down the tasks and transactions that people want to carry out.
Some frictions arise simply because things are poorly designed—the online learning platforms that students use to follow their courses, and the grant management systems that professors use to track their grant expenditures come to mind.
Yet other frictions arise out of a bureaucratic drive to implement required procedures and document everything in detail. A good fraction of activity reporting and committee work seems less about informing anyone of anything and more about allowing administrators to cover their hindquarters should anyone come complaining.
But many frictions—perhaps most of them—exist because someone wants them to. For example, for years one could subscribe to the New York Times with a click, but to cancel one had to speak to a live person during business hours. The motivation is obvious—they'd rather keep taking your money and if it is enough of a nuisance to cancel, maybe you won't bother. The New York Times employee who had to take these calls was doing a bullshit job; those of us waiting in the hold queue to talk to them were doing bullshit work.
Start looking, and you'll see deliberately engineered frictions all over the place. Returning an online order can be a nightmare. Automated phone trees make it unnecessarily difficult to reach a human. Doctors waste hours on medical charting to satisfy insurance companies that would rather not pay for treatments.
There might be potential to use AI to help us navigate the dehumanizing systems that humans have put into place.
This afternoon I tried to cancel a service contract and spent ninety minutes in hold queues, talking to one online chat person and two voice operators, each of whom read from the same customer retention scripts and tried to persuade me not to cancel. It was a classic example of deliberately introduced frictions, and it's easy to imagine that an LLM could have done all of this for me.
> Go online and cancel my contract with this company. Talk to their chat operator if necessary. If they tell you that have to visit a different website or call a different number, do that. You don't want a discount, a period of free service, or an enhanced package. You just want to cancel. Don't take no for an answer. Keep going until the contract is canceled.
Appealing as this sounds, we worry that this approach turns into an inevitable arms race. I like the idea of using an LLM to change my alarm service, but I’m going to be super pissed when I get home from work tomorrow and find 4 ex-Marines guarding the driveway in a Humvee because my AI got upsold onto the Diamond Platinum Plan.
Adequate consumer protection regulations strike us as simpler, fairer, and more efficient.
PRINCIPLE
There’s a lot of bullshit work: pointless tasks that don’t really need to be done and certainly don't need to be done right. It would be nice to eliminate these tasks, but as a first step we might be able to offload them onto bullshit machines.
DISCUSSION
Why is there so much bullshit work to be done in contemporary society?
VIDEO
Coming Soon.
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