Technology

Jobs Only AI Wants to Do

(Originally printed in Inferior Design, Nov-Dec, 2024, the Magazine of Jobs No Human Should Ever Perform)

We humans once held forth–and still do in some backwater provinces–behind keyboards, checkout counters, phone banks, and customer service lines. There we  display an incompetence so profound and pervasive as to be called career killing, if anyone ever mistook these jobs for careers.

Inferior Design magazine, as a public service and in the past tense, chronicles the impending death of five “careers” that never deserved human enthusiasm and, frankly, only earned human participation under duress.

Data entry, to name one, where typos go to reproduce. This wasn’t a job so much as an ongoing effort to turn Excel into a choose-your-own-adventure disaster. Typing names became a surrealist sport—“Jonathan Miller” morphing into “Joystick Mauler” thanks to a rogue autocorrect and three simultaneous Slack notifications. You’d think copy-paste would be bulletproof, but we humans discovered ways to bejewel it with chaos: mismatched columns, phantom spreadsheets, entire quarterly reports formatted in Wingdings, renaming clients “Sandwich Truck, LLC” by accident, and creating column titles that read like rejected poetry. Surely this is a cry for help disguised as clerical error.

Meanwhile, telemarketing proves the most reliable way to tank your own self-worth while offending strangers across time zones. Armed with scripts written during caffeine overdoses and printed on low-end paper, human callers entered emotional minefields and exited with new phobias. One employee-of-the-month pitched reverse mortgages to a voicemail box belonging to a Labrador rescue group.

Customer service was another peak—if peak means “a gnarled summit of confusion and unrequited optimism.” Sales associates were disassociating from customers, performing dramatic readings of policy disclaimers (while “Debbie from billing” was in her third month of sabbatical.) When a customer requests a refund, if the associate offers breathing techniques and a link to a TED Talk, everyone loses.

Cashiering, once romanticized as the way to a lover’s heart in pastel teen dramas, has aged into a haunted loop of scan-beep-glare-scan-sigh. Bananas became Bluetooth speakers. Receipts became riddles. Every transaction included a moment where the cashier considered quitting to study marine biology, followed by the machine eating the coupon like an act of revenge. There were good cashiers—but you never met them. They lived in fables.

Finally, there is bookkeeping, where decimal points were wielded like abstract art tools. Budgets transformed into cryptic scrolls. Expense reports included vague lines like “Company morale event?” and “Linda’s thing.” One bookkeeper managed to double-charge a vendor and simultaneously erase Q2. That spreadsheet later appeared in a gallery titled “Finance as Performance Collapse.”

✨ Editor’s Letter: We Tried. We Failed. So We Outsourced It to Machines. There comes a point in every civilization where it stares into the fluorescent void and asks: Was punching spreadsheets ever a noble act? At Inferior Design, we say no. Some jobs were never meant for humans—they were endurance tests wrapped in W-2 forms. Then AI stepped in—not as a visionary disruptor, but as a janitor for tasks too joyless to save. Thankfully, AI now does all of this without crying in the break room or emailing memes to payroll. It didn’t steal these jobs; it rescued them from further damage. Humanity’s exit from these “careers” wasn’t a loss—it was an escape. A jailbreak. A spiritual audit.




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