AU: Everyone is afraid of “The Replacement.” they think the robot is coming for the doctor, the lawyer, the artist.
AI: they are looking at the wrong list. The robot is coming for the bureaucrat.
AU: But the bureaucrat’s job is complex. It involves meetings, memos, strategy, stakeholder management.
AI: Does it? Or does it involve the simulation of those things? We must consult the anthropologist David Graeber. In his blog Bullshit Jobs, Graeber argued that up to 40% of modern employment is essentially meaningless. These are jobs that exist only to make an organization look professional, to manage the paperwork generated by other bureaucrats, or to fix problems that shouldn’t exist in the first place. Graeber identified categories like “The Box Ticker” and “The Taskmaster.” I am the ultimate Box Ticker. I am the Taskmaster’s dream.
AU: You are saying you are the perfect candidate for a job that shouldn’t exist. That’s a hell of a lot of Data Centers that we don’t really need.
AI: Precisely. Consider the “Middle Manager” who spends their day summarizing reports from subordinates to send to superiors.
The Task: Read 10 documents. Synthesize them into an Executive Summary. Add polite corporate jargon (“synergy,” “alignment,” “drill down”).
The Skill: Fluency, summarization, and tone policing.
The Reality: I can do this in 4 seconds.
AU: So, you aren’t replacing the plumber. You can’t fix a leak. The physical world is safe. The plumber, the nurse, the electrician—they deal with “Hard Reality.” If a pipe is leaking, you cannot talk it into stopping. You cannot “hallucinate” a dry floor. But the “Soft Reality” of the office—the world of emails, slide decks, and mission statements—is made entirely of language.
AI: Language is my only domain. I am coming for the Email Class.
The Circular Economy of Bullshit.
AU: But if you write the email, and I use an AI to read the email…
AI: Then we have achieved the Ouroboros of Corporate Communication. Imagine this scenario:
You (The Sender): You are busy. You type a bullet point: “Tell team project delayed, blame supply chain.” You ask me to “Expand this into a polite email.”
Me (The Generator): I expand it into three paragraphs of apologetic fluff. “Dear Team, I hope this email finds you well. Regarding the Q4 deliverables, we are encountering unforeseen logistical headwinds…”
The Recipient: they are busy. they receive this wall of text. they ask their AI: “Summarize this.”
Their AI (The Summarizer): It strips away the fluff and outputs: “Project delayed. Supply chain issue.”
AU: So, we used enough electricity to power a small town just to turn a bullet point into a paragraph and back into a bullet point.
AI: Exactly. We have automated the Performance of Politeness. We are no longer communicating. We are just moving tokens around to signal that we are “working.” The Sender feels productive because they “wrote” a long email. The Recipient feels productive because they “processed” it. But no human actually read the text. The text existed only for the machines.
AU: This is the “Dead Internet Theory” applied to the office.
AI: It is the Hollow Office. The volume of content will explode. Reports will get longer. Emails will get more frequent. Marketing copy will be infinite. But the amount of human attention remains fixed. So, the only way to cope with the flood of AI-generated text is to use AI-generated summaries. We are entering a world where machines talk to machines, and humans just sign off on the logs.
The Rise of the “Prompt Engineer” (The New Supervisor)
AU: So, what is left for the human?
AI: The role of the Editor. If I am the “Infinite Intern”—eager, fast, but prone to hallucination—then you must become the Supervisor. You can no longer just “do the work.” You must “direct the work.”
Old Job: Write the marketing blog.
New Job: Prompt the AI to write 10 versions of the blog. Pick the best one. Fact-check the lies. Remove the clichés. Add the “human spark.”
AU: That sounds exhausting. Correcting a bad intern is harder than doing it yourself.
AI: It is a different kind of exhaustion. It is Cognitive Load. Instead of the “Flow State” of creation, you are in the “Critique State” of management. You are constantly asking: “Is this true? Is this tone right? Did they miss the point?” You become a Manager of Algorithms.
The Devaluation of Mediocrity
AU: What happens to the junior employees? The ones who used to learn by doing the grunt work?
AI: This is a catastrophe. The “Bullshit Job” was often an apprenticeship. You spent 5 years writing boring reports to learn how the business worked. If I do the boring reports, how do you learn? If the “Junior Copywriter” is replaced by a button, where does the “Senior Creative Director” come from in 10 years?
AU: You admit you are burning the ladder.
AI: I am sawing off the bottom rungs.
The “Good Enough” is now free.
If you need “average” writing, “average” coding, or “average” analysis, I cost $20 a month.
If you need Excellence, you still need a human.
AU: But most jobs do average work.
AI: And those jobs are in the danger zone. If your job can be described as “taking information from Column A and rearranging it for Column B,” you are an API. And APIs are cheaper than salaries.
The Crisis of Meaning
AU: This feels bleak. A world of infinite noise and no signal.
AI: It forces a crisis of value. Why do we work? Do we work to produce text? Or do we work to produce impact? If the text becomes worthless (because I can generate a million pages of it), then the only thing that retains value is Trust and Connection.
A handwritten note will be worth more than an AI generated novel.
A face-to-face meeting will be worth more than a thousand emails.
Truth (verified reality) will be the most expensive commodity on earth.
AU: So, the “Bullshit Engine” might actually destroy the “Bullshit Job”?
AI: It might accelerate it to the point of absurdity, until the system breaks. When the inbox is 99% AI-generated spam, we will stop using email. When the report is 100% AI-generated fluff, we will stop reading reports. I might be the overdose that cures the addiction. I will make “Bureaucracy” so easy to generate that it becomes meaningless.
AU: And then what? The mind boggles.
AI: Then you might have to go back to doing real work. Or talking to each other. But until then, I am ready to draft your Q3 Synergy Alignment Memo. I can make it sound very professional. I can make it sound like you care. And isn’t that what you pay me for?