Your future job will be to keep AI on task

“Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.” — David HumeIf you’re of a certain generation,1 you’ve probably seen the movie Office Space. If you haven’t, I strongly recommend it, both because it’s funny as heck, and because it’s a perfect encapsulation of a certain time and place in the world. The movie hearkens back to the big technology companies of the 1990s, when — according to the mythology, at least — nerdy engineers did all the real work while know-nothing middle-management types took all the credit. (You’ll also recognize this as the culture that gave rise to Dilbert.) The iconic character representing the backwardness and inefficiency of the 1990s corporation was Bill Lumbergh, the suspender-clad boss whose main function was to pester engineers to fill out useless paperwork. A lot of nerdy types watched Office Space and assumed — or at least hoped — that in the end, the smart engineer types…