The Deprecation of Routine

You would have thought the bureaucrats would be among those most easily replaced by automation, but since it is the law of nature that govt never shrinks, it turns out that you can displace radiologists with AI but never a clerk.

The lawyers may eventually lose this one. Automata charges by the microsecond, not by the hour. AI can learn all the routine stuff. What both man and machine will value most in the future is new knowledge, aka information, aka surprise. There will be no end of potential material as the known unknowns grow faster with each new known known.

This will create a profound power shift away from institutions which ration resources to optimize their survival to institutions that continuously evolve in response to the truth.