The list of potential victims of artificial intelligence is long. It includes every business, all software engineers, privacy and humanity itself. But some of its expected effects are more popular than others. Most people can agree, for example, that AI will be doing workers a tremendous favour if it gets rid of grunt work, the sort of tediously repetitive tasks that take up too much of everyone’s days. Filling out expense claims, copying and pasting things into spreadsheets, trying to resize one of those stupid boxes in PowerPoint—if people were able to outsource this drudgery to machines, they could devote more attention to higher-value tasks.
