You are both right, and that's where it gets interesting.

While the category of tedious work you have described is indeed heavily optimized, it is also heavily incentivized by the structure of our economy. The sheer volume of tedious unnecessary work that is done today represents a very significant portion of work that is done in general. Instead of resulting in less work, the productivity gains from optimization have simply lead to a vacuum that is immediately filled with more equivalent work.

To get a sense for the scale of this pattern, consider the fact that wages in general have been stagnant since the mid '70s, while productivity in general has been skyrocketing. Also consider the bullshit jobs you are already familiar with, like inter-insurance healthcare data processing in the US. We could obviously eliminate millions of these jobs without any technical progress whatsoever: it would only require enough political will to use the same single-payer healthcare system every other developed nation uses.

Why is this the case? Why are we (as individual laborers) not simply working less or earning more? Copyright.

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The most alluring promise of Artificial Intelligence has always been, since John McCarthy coined the term, to make ambiguous data computable. Ambiguity is the fundamental problem no one has been able to solve. Bottom-up approaches including parsing and language abstractions are doomed to unambiguous equivalence to mathematics (see category theory). No matter how flexible lisp is, it will always express precisely the answers to "What?" and "How?", never "Why?". The new wave of LLMs and Transformers is a top-down approach, but it's not substantive enough to really provide the utility of computability.

So what if it could? What if we had a program that could actually compute the logic present in Natural Language data? I've been toying with a very abstract idea (the Story Empathizer) that could potentially accomplish this. While I haven't really made progress, I've been thinking a lot about what success might look like.

The most immediate consequence that comes to mind is that it would be the final nail in the coffin for Copyright.

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So what does Copyright have to do with all of this? Copyright defines the rules of our social-economic system. Put simply, Copyright promises to pay artists for their work without paying them for their labor. To accomplish this, Copyright defines "a work" as a countable item, representing the result of an artists labor. The artist can then sell their "work" over and over again to earn a profit on their investment of unpaid labor.

To make this system function, Copyright demands that no one collaborate with that labor, else they would breach the artist's monopoly on their "work". This creates an implicit demand that all intellectual labor be, by default, incompatible. Incompatibility is the foundational anti-competitive framework for monopoly. If we can work together, then neither of us is monopolizing.

This is how Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, NVIDIA, etc. build their moats. By abusing the incompatibility bestowed by their copyrights, they can demand that meaningful competition be made from completely unique work. Want to write a CUDA-compatible driver? You must start from scratch.

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But what if your computer could just write it for you? What if you could provide a reasonably annotated copy of NVIDIA's CUDA implementation, and just have AI generate an AMD one? Your computer would be doing the collaboration, not you. Copyright would define it as technically illegal, but what does that matter when all of your customers can just download the NVIDIA driver, run a script, and have a full-fledged AMD CUDA setup? At some point, the incompatibility that Copyright depends on will be factored out.

But that begs the question: Copyright is arbitrary to begin with, so what if we just dropped it? Would it really be that difficult to eliminate bullshit work if we, as a society, were simply allowed to collaborate without permission?