Listened to Ben Evans and Toni Cowan-Brown talking about friction and how AI will remove that in Another Podcast. The funniest thing came to mind about what happened when the digital revolution removed friction and how there were, perhaps, unintended consequences.

When the friction of e.g. booking meetings and organising travel went down, the number of secretaries and assistants also went down. Most likely because the time and expertise for any given administrative task completion went down, meaning that the admin tasks could be done by the professionals themselves. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics calls this out explicitly:

Technology, including artificial intelligence (AI) systems and digital tools, enables staff in many organizations to prepare their own documents without the help of secretaries. Additionally, many executive secretaries and executive administrative assistants support more than one manager in an organization, and many managers now do tasks that were previously done by these workers.

At the same time, there is evidence that the increase of administrative tasks on the academics had an impact on the core tasks of academics:

High levels of administrative burden do not merely impact individuals but also have broader organizational ramifications. In the case of universities, any increases in administrative burden inevitably reduce the time and energy that can be devoted to the core activities of research and teaching.

I suspect the same is true for other professionals. In other words what has happened is that while digitalisation has removed a lot of work, some of it has resulted in an increased workload for certain roles, with the side effect of making those jobs more miserable. Maybe AI will help here by removing that part of the friction, maybe removing friction from specialised tasks will result in other type of friction elsewhere?