by: Ben
Your bosses have a dream. It is a vision of the future. It is a world of limitless productivity. It is a technology, this dream—a technology that can take any person and automate away all their drudgery, that can multiply their power to deliver, that will eliminate all barriers to success, that will make you go fast, faster than that even. It is a shared dream. They are all talking about it. Their bosses are talking about it. Their bosses’ bosses, the board, everybody.
It isn’t even a dream—it’s already here, or if it’s not here already, it’s just around the corner. How could it not be, haven’t we been able to achieve the unachievable, haven’t the chips been getting smaller, haven’t we doubled our transistors every two years and won’t we keep on doubling them? It’s already changed how they work, your bosses, it’s made things so much easier. It writes emails. It summarizes their meetings. It gives them the pertinent information from all the documents they’d have had ordinarily to pretend to read.
Sure, maybe it’s not helping you—but have you done the work to get up to speed? Have you figured out how to use them for the better, because we know these things work. Again, it is already helping them. And there are so many stories of people who could do things they never could without it. Somebody was right up against the edge of physics, so close they could see the other side. And, if it wasn’t the future, why would everyone they know be saying it was? If it didn’t work would they be selling it?
They couldn’t do your job, of course, your bosses, with it, but it’s close. Look, it’s close. It can do so many things already. This weekend your bosses made websites, a mobile app, they planned their vacations, they almost got it to make a reservation for them at a restaurant. This stuff is crazy. And it will only get better. Aren’t you worried about your job? You should get to know it, use it. You need to. Otherwise you will be left behind.
It’s not working for you? But don’t you see you need to figure out how to make it work? Your bosses need you. They need you to get them some success stories. They need to show we are all in. We are all in on productivity. You’re not sure you’re moving faster, and you’re worried now that things are slipping through, errors, time bombs. Won’t we be held accountable if something it does goes wrong? You have to figure it out, your bosses say. You can do it. It’ll get better, anyway, so we’ll be ready.
Your coworkers are getting forgetful? They can’t seem to do the things they used to do without the tool, and they’re not much faster? And even when they’re faster, you have to clean up after them more—redo things the right way, and redo them again. You feel crazy—that’s just because you haven’t adapted to the new paradigm, everything is going this way, this is just how we do things now. Your job is to keep an eye on things, make sure nothing goes awry. Constant vigilance, you can do it, right?
Your bosses have a dream. It’s a world where there is no more expertise, no craft, only execution. They imagine a world where the only special skill is care and feeding of the machine. Some believe in it sincerely and would be shocked to have it explained that in their dream the only people with any agency are managers, everyone else is a drone, interchangeable, cheap, devoid of skill. It’s not a real dream, it’s a delusion. They cannot eliminate expertise, the technology is not and will never be that good, they can only devalue it. Some know this is what they’re doing: getting you to take less pay or put out more work at the same quality because of the imagined “help” you’re provided. Renting out your humanity cheap to fill the void at the heart of Generative AI. For them, it doesn’t matter whether it works or not—it only matters whether you are willing to devalue yourself in the light of the onslaught.