Two-sentence summary

In Recursive Middle Manager Hell, Raemon argues that organisations get increasingly warped (immoral/maze-like/misaligned/...) as they gain more levels of hierarchy.^[1] I conjecture that analogous dynamics also arise in the context of AI automation.

To be frank, I think 95% of the value of my post comes just from the two-sentence tl;dr above. If you haven't done so yet, I recommend reading Recursive Middle Manager Hell and then asking "how does this change in the context of automating jobs by AI". But let me give some thoughts anyway.

Automation so far

[low confidence, informal] It seems to me that automation so far mostly worked like this:

Mostly on the level of individual tasks (eg, "Google creating a calendar event based on me receiving flight tickets via email", as opposed to "Google automatically handling all of my calendar events").
Mostly without very long chains with no human in the loop (eg, the calendar example above, but mostly not long chains of Zapier macros).
Mostly trying to imitate humans, rather than find novel solutions (eg, when Google puts a flight into my calendar, it does the same steps I would do, except automated. When Excel computes stuff for me, it likewise just performs calculations that I came up with.).

I think this is starting to change. On the abstract level, I would say that (3) has changed with the introduction of ML, and (1) & (2) will now be changing because LLMs are growing more general and capable.

Examples

But perhaps it is better to instead give more specific examples of "recursive middle automaton hell":

We already have some companies using ML to do the initial screening of CVs for job applications. And some companies might also use AI to do the same for (job-application) cover letters etc. Similarly, some people are starting to use LLMs for fine-tuning their CVs or writing their cover letters. But this is still somewhat rare, so most of these interactions are still human-human or human-AI. What happens once most of these interactions are with black-box AIs on both sides?
One of the joys of academic work is [writing recommendation letters, reading recommendation letters, writing grant proposals, reviewing grant proposals, writing grant reports, and reviewing grant reports. Aaaah!]. Most work in each of these tasks is boring, annoying, and monotonous. Let's automate it, hurray! ... but what happe

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Middle management