I was taken aback by a remarkable statement by software engineer Kent Beck, author of extreme Programming, He tweeted, “I’ve been reluctant to try ChatGPT.” up to 1000x. I need to recalculate.” I remembered this when I was looking at a new report (bit.ly/3BGbIby) on AI and the future of work by Microsoft Worklab. There were some interesting revelations in this: More than half of a typical workday of a corporate employee was devoted to communication such as emails, meetings, chats, etc. The remaining 43% was for actual creative work, and even a lot of that was about creating spreadsheets. , documents in various formats or slides to present in meetings. No wonder more than two-thirds of workers complain that they don’t have time for uninterrupted focus during their work day. I sympathize with this. I was a corporate citizen for more than two decades and a ‘solopreneur’ for the last few years. While being an entrepreneur comes with endless struggles, my productivity has often been freed from countless meetings discussing the same old issues, with the same information being presented to different people in different formats in a work routine. Which really leaves no time for any deep thought. ,
As the generative AI tidal wave spreads across industries and offices, I believe it will impact this aspect of corporate life the most. We often do not consider work as an industry in its own right, although it is several trillion dollars, and confuse work with jobs. We worry about how AI will affect jobs, but neglect how it will affect work. Investigating this, I stumbled upon another post, this time on LinkedIn, which had a great way of breaking down work into three types. the first is where you should be Work, which is about your role, be it as an accountant, programmer, marketer or journalist. the second is where you are Show, through a format, be it a slide, chart, spreadsheet, code or summary. and the third is when you need createOr do a creative work, such as an essay, recipe, code or sales pitch.
Show For a worker the part is probably the most tedious and repetitive. Good visualization and presentation is important, but time consuming and often tedious. This is where generative AI is coming into its own, with innovations like Microsoft Copilot building slides, charts and documents on the fly, and even converting content from one format, say a document, to another. In, like a slide deck. As we have come to realize, ChatGPT and its ilk are reasonably adept at cognitive tasks, and therefore have the potential to help humans in the third task domain of creative tasks. Copy and Jasper help create great marketing materials, Stable Diffusion and Dull-e2 create amazing images for artists and designers, Jukebox helps create ad jingles and GitHub Copilot writes solid code. AI will not create superlative pieces of work, at least not yet, and it will require human workers to hone and refine its output to perfection. what it will do is enable you and me to focus more on Work Part of the job: being a star investigative journalist, for example, or a 10x programmer, creative marketer, or a meticulous accountant. In a sense, this will allow us to go back to the roots of work, where we can spend our working hours far more productively either in highly cognitive or intensive manual jobs, performing mundane and repetitive tasks on AI tools. can leave.
However, there is a flip side to handing over basic jobs to AI. There are lots of human workers who do these things for a living – whether they are customer service representatives, basic programmers or payroll accountants. As generative AI becomes pervasive in our organizations, these jobs are at risk; Examples in this case are Vodafone, which wants to cut jobs by almost half and use AI instead, or IBM stopping some hiring for the same reason. This is where we humans have to step up and learn how to work with AI and develop “AI Aptitude” as the WorkLab report says. We have been good at working with revolutionary technologies. We learned how to use tools like fire, personal computers and the Internet to improve our work and create new jobs for humans. We have to do the same with this powerful technology and use it to distance ourselves from the mundane and the monotonous. It won’t be AI that can do our jobs, but other humans using AI, and we need to choose which of the two we are. We need to recalculate.
Jaspreet Bindra is a technology expert, author of ‘The Tech Whisperer’, and is currently pursuing his Masters in AI and Ethics from the University of Cambridge.
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Updated: May 26, 2023, 01:45 AM IST