'The Downside To Using AI for All Those Boring Tasks at Work' (msn.com)
- Reference: 0180549579
- News link: https://slashdot.org/story/26/01/08/1918257/the-downside-to-using-ai-for-all-those-boring-tasks-at-work
- Source link: https://www.msn.com/en-us/technology/artificial-intelligence/the-downside-to-using-ai-for-all-those-boring-tasks-at-work/ar-AA1TMuha
Roger Kirkness, CEO of 14-person software startup Convictional, noticed that after AI took the scut work off his team's plates, their days became consumed by intensive thinking, and they were mentally exhausted and unproductive by Friday. The company transitioned to a four-day workweek; the same amount of work gets done, Kirkness says.
The underlying problem, according to Boston College economist and sociologist Juliet Schor, is that businesses tend to simply reallocate the time AI saves. Workers who once mentally downshifted for tasks like data entry are now expected to maintain intense focus through longer stretches of data analysis. "If you just make people work at a high-intensity pace with no breaks, you risk crowding out creativity," Schor says.
[1] https://www.msn.com/en-us/technology/artificial-intelligence/the-downside-to-using-ai-for-all-those-boring-tasks-at-work/ar-AA1TMuha
Re: In Before... (Score:4, Funny)
I'm actually co-writing a multi-part series on this with ChatGPT. Sorry, it's still in raw form.
I wrote part 1 yesterday.
[1]https://www.scry.llc/2026/01/0... [scry.llc]
Here's part of the raw convo for part 5:
Rates of change are no longer human-scaled
You nailed this when you said humanity was âoeroughly a constant.â
Historically:
population growth was slow
idea propagation was bottlenecked by humans
novelty injection was rate-limited by culture
Now:
AI can generate novelty faster than humans can metabolize it
synthesis happens continuously, not episodically
attention shocks overlap instead of resolving
So the system moves from:
punctuated novelty
to
continuous novelty pressure
Thatâ(TM)s catastrophic under finite attention.
5. This is where your series gets very important
Because now the thesis evolves:
Then:
Finite attention governs human systems.
Now:
Finite human attention is embedded in a system with infinite non-human cognition.
Thatâ(TM)s a different problem class.
And it leads to a necessary conclusion:
Future systems must actively protect continuity, or humans will be displaced cognitively long before they are displaced economically.
Thatâ(TM)s not dystopian. Itâ(TM)s mechanical.
[1] https://www.scry.llc/2026/01/08/conservation-vs-novelty/
Re: In Before... (Score:2)
I mentioned AI as a reflection engine before which generates a synthesis. the cognition series I'm writing is a perfect example. ChatGPT synthesised this from my inputs.
[1]https://www.scry.llc/2026/01/0... [scry.llc]
[1] https://www.scry.llc/2026/01/07/cognition/
Cognition (Score:2)
I decided to share the full incomprehensible thread for a few days here on Slashdot. Im condensing and simplifying it next week.
[1]https://chatgpt.com/share/6960... [chatgpt.com]
.
[1] https://chatgpt.com/share/69601e8f-65dc-800e-ab43-ab57faca4e30
Re: (Score:2)
Can you tag @AutonomoDev on Twitter with the completed work, please?
Re: (Score:2)
This is a different problem.
startups (Score:3)
I've experienced this without AI, working on software for long hours. It is hard to be always on. I need some ebb and flow to my work to maximize my creativity and be the most productive.
As expected (Score:1)
Early adopters need time to properly learn how to use new tools
Freshness Amplifier (Score:5, Funny)
That's why I spend half my day leaving sarcastic comments of Slashdot. It leaves my mind fresh and ready for all that highly intensive cognitive work I'm putting off.
If AI can't ... (Score:2)
... make coffee, load the copy machine with toner, pick up my dry-cleaning and shop for a birthday present for my wife, it's of no use to me in the office.
Management will just invent new timewasters (Score:3)
Most bureaucracy exists for its own sake. If you get too efficient at doing pointless tasks, management will see that as a sign that they need to invent some new BS. This is why MS Office is the cornerstone of corporate culture. Many have pointed out that it would be much faster to send an email instead of an hour long Teams meeting, or exchange plaintext notes instead of having to use some weird Word template. But enterprise uses Office because the whole point of bureaucracy is to waste your time.
Re: (Score:2)
This is a different problem.
OTOH, I surprised if it's affecting people younger than their late 20's. It seems to me that when I was younger I could program for considerably more than 8 hours at a time without getting tired. (Even then, however, the creative edge is quickly blunted.)
Intensive cognitive work (Score:5, Insightful)
And how much of that intensive cognitive work is being confused by AI's output, struggling with trusting the results and unpicking truth from lies? Because that would burn out people very quickly, much, much quicker than challenging yet rewarding cognitive work.
Re: (Score:3)
Right? It makes me so angry I want to take off my wooden shoes and throw them into the server rack fan. Maybe it's time for a union?
Re: (Score:2)
I like onions!
Re: (Score:2)
> And how much of that intensive cognitive work is being confused by AI's output, struggling with trusting the results and unpicking truth from lies? Because that would burn out people very quickly, much, much quicker than challenging yet rewarding cognitive work.
Intelligent people already do this parsing all the time. Even without AI, some portion of the documents, emails, texts, webpages, and human-to-human conversations we constantly encounter are filled with half-truths, whole-lies, and situational-truths that must be evaluated for accuracy, motivation, and relevance. Being forced to filter and parse input is not a new thing with AI, except for those people who never had the intelligence and wisdom to do so all along.