AI Uncovers Time-Wasting Tasks in the Workday

AI Isn't Destroying Jobs: It's Revealing Meaningless Work

An office worker has revolutionized their workday. Previously, they used classic Pomodoros: 25 minutes of work, five of rest. Now, they've flipped it. Five minutes giving instructions to a language model and 25 checking their phone. The work, they claim, gets done just the same. This leads to an uncomfortable conclusion: if a task can be resolved in five minutes with software, perhaps it never needed a full workday. Artificial intelligence isn't here to take your job. It's here to show how much of what you did was filler.

What Are the Meaningless Tasks AI Exposes?

Anthropologist David Graeber coined the term over a decade ago. His thesis was uncomfortable: some jobs produce nothing yet are paid the same. That diagnosis referred to entire positions. The current situation is more elusive. Twenty minutes here, an endless report there, an approval no one reads. Useless tasks don't disappear; they fragment across departments, so no one feels singled out.

The question hovering over this issue is what exactly is being replaced. Examples cited range from administrative to specialized roles: human resources, quality departments, notary offices. They all share a characteristic: their product is a document that requires another document to exist.

Why Installing ChatGPT Doesn't Boost Productivity

The most common explanation isn't about the tool itself. The time saved doesn't return to the worker or improve the outcome. It gets filled. It's filled with meetings, presentations, internal training, and what office jargon calls "alignments." Automating a task and then inventing another to justify the workday leaves the balance exactly where it was.

There's a second, more material, brake. For years of cheap money, inefficiencies didn't hurt anyone. When credit becomes more expensive and someone looks at the profit and loss account, the conversation changes. And a third, the oldest reason: Keynes promised a 15-hour workweek, and technology arrived, but the workday didn't shrink. No one in charge of staff was in a hurry to redistribute the time saved.

Which Jobs Defend Themselves, and Which Lose Their Arguments

Some argue that 80% of secondary school teachers and 60% of university professors are redundant. Conversely, another participant counters that emotion and human connection influence learning; the classroom isn't just data transmission.

There's a movement in the opposite direction. The SAMU Trade School has launched four-month courses for unemployed youth, with 75% of the time dedicated to company internships, in trades like welding, gardening, maintenance, hospitality, or support for people with disabilities. Compared to diffuse office work, these are tangible, hands-on trades.

The AI Audit No One Dares to Request in Public Administration

The scenario is described in detail: cross-referencing emails, tasks, reports, organizational charts, and salaries, and letting the model identify who is redundant, where bottlenecks exist, and which positions are pure ornamentation. In the private sector, according to a headline cited in the thread, something similar peine without AI: at Twitter, hundreds were laid off, and entire offices were closed in several countries, yet the service continued. Whether that improved or worsened the product is debated, with neither side changing its position.

In public administration, the calculation is different: permanent positions act as a shield, and no such audit has been launched.

And salary seals the deal. The same profile describing a filler workday points to the figure: less than 2,000 euros per month in Malaga, with a scooter and a shared flat as the outlook. The task was useless; the salary, in the opinion of the person recounting it, was too.