Dividing a job into tasks

Arvind Narayanan talking about dividing job into tasks and the boundaries between them.

…if you define jobs in terms of tasks maybe you’re actually defining away the most nuanced and hardest-to-automate aspects of jobs, which are at the boundaries between tasks.

Can you break up your own job into a set of well-defined tasks such that if each of them is automated, your job as a whole can be automated? I suspect most people will say no. But when we think about other people’s jobs that we don’t understand as well as our own, the task model seems plausible because we don’t appreciate all the nuances.

If this is correct, it is irrelevant how good AI gets at task-based capability benchmarks. If you need to specify things precisely enough to be amenable to benchmarking, you will necessarily miss the fact that the lack of precise specification is often what makes jobs messy and complex in the first place. So benchmarks can tell us very little about automation vs augmentation.