That one really made me think: “Because often the bit of your job that can be most easily automated is the easy “downtime” stuff — maybe your favourite bit, or the boring bit that lets your brain rest a little before you turn it back onto the really difficult high intensity thinking work.”
I wholeheartedly agree. AI is not only impacting entry jobs (in academia, it’s very clear that many internships or student assistantships are now being handled by AI when it comes to repetitive tasks like data cleaning), it also supposedly makes us “more productive” by removing these frictionless tasks from our workdays. So, what are we supposed to do with all that free time? Only high intensity, cognitively demanding tasks? That’s super unrealistic.
Love your thoughts here. I often default to "they must just be better at this than me, maybe it's better agents" when I hear discourse on AI changing the nature of work and how it is used, lol. I've never argued so much through the course of the day as I do with AI. It creates a new kind of stress - what it produces can be amazing, but also not quite right and then I have to fix that. I don't want to be a fixer beyond solving fun problems 😅
One million per cent agree — I am incandescent 80 per cent of the time. Any human who has ever worked with me will tell you I am a very happy and upbeat and helpful colleague. But to the machine I am furious.
Same!! I am pure joy and delight, have never had a workplace fight. Give me Claude for ten minutes though.... and don't get me started on whatever ChatGPT is 😅🤣🤦🏻♀️
I can definitely relate to the idea that the hour of lame tasks that AI helps me do was perhaps my least stressy of the day. Now generally replaced with, if not a more stressy hour, definitely a more alert/engaged hour. I generally dull the intensity with a cookie or similar baked good.
Rachael, perhaps the real test of an AI assistant isn’t whether it can do a task, but whether you can trust it enough to stop watching over its shoulder. If you still have to supervise every move, you haven’t really handed over the task.
That one really made me think: “Because often the bit of your job that can be most easily automated is the easy “downtime” stuff — maybe your favourite bit, or the boring bit that lets your brain rest a little before you turn it back onto the really difficult high intensity thinking work.”
I wholeheartedly agree. AI is not only impacting entry jobs (in academia, it’s very clear that many internships or student assistantships are now being handled by AI when it comes to repetitive tasks like data cleaning), it also supposedly makes us “more productive” by removing these frictionless tasks from our workdays. So, what are we supposed to do with all that free time? Only high intensity, cognitively demanding tasks? That’s super unrealistic.
Completely - it is the problem of work intensification and we act like that is a universal good. I was speaking to Prof Nicholas Davis at UTS about the value of friction in my podcast only last week https://open.spotify.com/episode/1Ri5XxtSwrDJjUYaKVpeHI?si=r0LitybaS5SQa5dnzQV5Yw
Love your thoughts here. I often default to "they must just be better at this than me, maybe it's better agents" when I hear discourse on AI changing the nature of work and how it is used, lol. I've never argued so much through the course of the day as I do with AI. It creates a new kind of stress - what it produces can be amazing, but also not quite right and then I have to fix that. I don't want to be a fixer beyond solving fun problems 😅
One million per cent agree — I am incandescent 80 per cent of the time. Any human who has ever worked with me will tell you I am a very happy and upbeat and helpful colleague. But to the machine I am furious.
Same!! I am pure joy and delight, have never had a workplace fight. Give me Claude for ten minutes though.... and don't get me started on whatever ChatGPT is 😅🤣🤦🏻♀️
I can definitely relate to the idea that the hour of lame tasks that AI helps me do was perhaps my least stressy of the day. Now generally replaced with, if not a more stressy hour, definitely a more alert/engaged hour. I generally dull the intensity with a cookie or similar baked good.
I think “Cookies help me cope” would make a great mug/tshirt
Rachael, perhaps the real test of an AI assistant isn’t whether it can do a task, but whether you can trust it enough to stop watching over its shoulder. If you still have to supervise every move, you haven’t really handed over the task.
agree!