Increasing productivity and reducing work time with technology isn’t strictly speaking a new idea, blue collar industrial workers faced this already during the mid-19th century during the industrial age, but for the first time white collar knowledge workers are impacted, and they are probably not backed by any labour union.

There have been lots of riots and protests according to Wikipedia, so apparently the workforce wasn’t all happy with the outcome, but we aren’t there yet, so let us focus on the promise of improved work-life-balance.

Interestingly during that time a strange phenomenon could be observed:

This is just an excerpt of an article written for a magazine under the umbrella of things nobody would print, as the author points out in his book Bullshit Jobs [bullshitjobsbook], but still the term hits a mark. There are a lot more examples and explanations in the book or supposedly bullshit jobs and also jobs that just feel like one, but my key takeaway is the implied question what can our highly skilled workforce do for a living, when their field of expertise has been replaced with automatons and we haven’t reached a moneyless utopia yet?

Another issue I see with increasing productivity is the orientation towards throughput or rather output in general in information related topics. Viewed from the business side increasing quantity makes sense to me, this is what the business has been created for in the first place, but is output the only and ulterior goal and the learning how to reach and achieve something can be totally neglected?

If your media feeds are like mine, there is probably something about AI every two or three posts and depending on the type of media, like e.g. LinkedIn, the posts are full of promises and how the full potential of AI can be unlocked to utilize it for your business.

Oftentimes these posts appear to be written with the help of AI and especially em-dashes enjoy increasing popularity. I think eating your own dog food is always advisable, so I see no fault there. On the other hand, I can rarely find some kind of empirical evidence or any other kind of proof for these theses and here I consider this usually as a red flag - skepticism can help.

The current hype and pressure increases and academia has also started looking into the phenomenon of development of fear of missing out on AI. And there is an increasingly number of posts and voices besides the ones from common {aibro][AI Bros] who foretell if you don’t start to use AI today you are going to lose your edge.

Let us start with something positive: AI does a splendid job of lowering the bar to access information! Hallucinations vary between dangerous and hilarious and some people are bold enough to state this is an original feature of LLM design, but with our previous established skepticism regarding media consumption this should be fine.

Delivering probability-based answers to question is only part of the deal, another great application of these models if for content generation and both goes perfectly hand in hand:

I personally think we should just stick to the bullet point list instead of applying a "prosa-2-text" conversion twice, but still I wonder what happens to the quality of the information underneath. Writing this blog post or generally writing is a really time-consuming task. Drafting a new post and trying to fill the intended outline with content is a tasks which helps me personally to pinpoint what I really want to say^[4] and I wouldn’t want to miss this journey.

I am a bit afraid the following is more than true: