AI will eliminate busywork. Are we sure that’s a good thing?

In the show Severance’s dystopian workplace — is there any other kind? — employees spend their days studying arrays of numbers bobbing on their screens. Whenever a cluster of numbers makes an employee feel unsettled, the employee clicks on it to discard it. The work’s value is not apparent to the workers, who are told only that they are “refining macro-data files,” but the job is nevertheless satisfying to complete. When one protagonist, Helly, tosses enough bad numbers, she is…