AI is useful for business, and it's used in business. Hiring people to do menial mental tasks that would be particularly easy to automate is cheap. Hiring programmers and AI developers to automate those tasks is expensive. I know people who lacked a CS degree and could barely program who transitioned to work as a programmer by getting hired to do a menial task and writing mundane old-fashioned code to automate away their job because that was the only way they could find to transition from menial tasks to a highly skill occupation.

You don't even need AI to automate a lot of these tasks. Good old fashioned programming can automate anything truly menial better than AI can, but if you're going to solve a real problem through code there are only two ways to do it: 1) write the code yourself, or 2) spend millions of dollars hiring other people to do it.

Same is true for AI. In contrast, you can very often hire people to solve the same tasks for minimum wage, or if its a sufficiently digital task, even less than that, through a service like mechanical chimp.

AI isn't used to automate away menial tasks because the economics of it doesn't make sense. None of the problems raised by that article are difficult to overcome, it's just expensive to hire people who solve them well.

This has nothing to do with technology and everything to do with the current organization of society and its economy.