A new crop of artificial intelligence tools carries the promise of streamlining tasks, improving efficiency and boosting productivity in the workplace. But that hasn’t been Neil Clarke’s experience so far.
In the article, one source stated that their work has become more intense. This isn’t something I anticipated, but it seems the logical conclusion: if you utilize AI for all the easiest parts of your job, then all that remains are the hard parts, which now dominate your workday because you knocked out all the easy things quickly.
Gets me thinking about how I need some of the easy things to be a release valve for my workflow. I need the sense of accomplishment from those easier/smaller tasks to keep up my morale and energy for the larger projects.
I feel the same way; having a mix of high- and low-intensity tasks in a workday stresses me out less because I can use the easier tasks as a warmup or cooldown for the larger tasks.
Any tool for productivity improvement is seen by leadership as a way to heap more work onto each individual worker. More work per worker means more profit per hour the worker is paid.
Our economic reality is diametrically opposed to this concept people seem to naively hold of “automation making things easier”, or somehow needing to work less for the same money because “computers are doing it”. No, that benefit does not ever visit the worker, it goes right to the owners.
That reminds me of Bullshit Jobs.
