Getting Ready To Exist
Fernando Pessoa | AI is unraveling the social fabric of work | Week in Review
I’d woken early, and I took a long time getting ready to exist.
| Fernando Pessoa
…
Since my son Conrad and daughter-in-law Lydia had a new baby (Killian) in September, I have a new role in life: walking their dog when Conrad drops him off around 6 am, Monday through Friday.
This has a few benefits. One, I take a walk in the morning light (at least now that winter is over) and gently mull over thoughts before I sit in front of a screen. Second, this has led me to go to bed an hour or so earlier and get a longer rest. Third, because I am obliged to take the walk, once Rocky and I return, I am already a few thousand steps toward my daily step goal.
I often think about Pessoa’s quote when making that walk, and when 7 am rolls around, and I sit down at my desk with a cup of coffee, I am ready to exist.
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AI is unraveling the social fabric of work.
Aki Ito, who had become one of my favorite writers, has written The antisocial workplace1, and I pulled the lede as the title of this section, although she — or her editor — buried it like seven paragraphs in:
AI is unraveling the social fabric of work.
She uses a marketing director, Daniel Duceuster, as a lens into how AI is attenuating human interaction in the workplace:
Deceuster is early to recognize a profound shift underway as AI tools permeate corporate America [he said he is interacting 50% less with coworkers]. “People are increasingly choosing to work alone,” says Jessica Reif, an incoming professor of management at Wharton who’s been studying AI’s effects on teamwork.
Signs of strain are already emerging. In January, Cisco found that its employees who were the most active AI users trusted their teams less than intermittent users, likely because the power users were spending more time on their own and less time with their colleagues. “AI can unintentionally create isolation,” the company concluded, “when it’s adopted individually rather than collectively.” The coaching platform BetterUp found that some workers are turning to AI for the kind of feedback they used to seek from mentors and managers. Those employees tended to report lower levels of team coordination, along with higher rates of burnout and a greater desire to leave their jobs.
Less contact and socialization with others can lead to a fragmentation of the social glue holding things together:
“If we aren’t thoughtful about this, we risk turning work into something that feels more isolated and atomized,” Reif tells me. “We’ll just be combining our inputs in a way that feels more like an assembly line than a vibrant workplace.”
[…]
If the previous office tools made it easier for colleagues to connect, AI seems to be replacing those connections altogether. “ChatGPT and tools like it are giving us this alternative way to accumulate knowledge that would otherwise be shared interpersonally,” Reif tells me. “It gives people this option of opting out.”
Pre-AI collaboration tools have led to over-communication and overwhelm. Now AI shows up, and users may adopt it to reduce the overhead and friction of collaboration.
Even Ito started to opt out herself, relying on ChatGPT instead of interacting extensively with her editor, Zak.
For a while, I was pleased with my lower-friction ways. But as I reported out this story, I started to wonder what I might be losing in my quest to bother Zak less. I was certainly talking to him less. Was I missing out on opportunities to learn from him? Was I losing my ability to navigate disagreements? Did I feel less close to him? I wondered what being less needy was doing to the most important professional relationship I have — and what that meant for how I ultimately felt about my job.
Collaboration overwhelm is a real thing. But are they throwing out the baby with the bathwater?
The small interactions that our jobs previously forced us to have were what made teams work well together — often without anyone realizing it. They built the goodwill colleagues need to navigate the disagreements that inevitably come up.
[…]
People will still need to coordinate effectively and trust each other — even if their day-to-day work becomes more solitary.
Ito quotes some others who are trying to balance LLM use with social ties, so that the benefits -- like strategic alignment don’t get lost as everyone is talking to the LLM agents, and critical insights never get shared.
The challenge for all of us will be to juggle these new tradeoffs: the immediate productivity benefits of a less interdependent workplace, alongside our need for teams that work well together and jobs that still give us a sense of connection.
I think this personalization of the social impacts of AI is just wrong, much like exhorting individuals to become more resilient in the face of the pandemic or other exogenous forces. Ito does point her finger at the companies:
That’s why it’s ultimately up to our companies — and the people who are redesigning the way work gets done inside them — to figure out systematic ways to preserve the social aspects of our jobs.
And maybe our governments, as well. Regulations to slow or stop the alienation (or replacement) of people by AI could be crucial, but never mentioned. She contrasts the pandemic and remote work upending everything: on one side, post-COVID, some companies forced everyone back to the office, while others retained hybrid/remote work and emulated face-to-face interactions. She also compares the blowback on screens in schools (which is the closest she comes to discussing government stepping in).
How long will it take for our workplaces to figure out how to benefit from AI’s productivity boosts without driving us away from each other? “We don’t even know what we’ve unleashed yet,” says Deceuster, “or how to effectively use it.”
Which is a good reason to slow down.
Week In Review
The Anti-Social Century
Aki Ito referenced Derek Thompson’s The Anti-Social Century, which draws on Robert Putnam and Eric Klinenberg‘s work detailing how lonely and alone Americans are, but even without bowling leagues and rotary meetings,
we still go to work. Even as all those other communal institutions withered away, work kept bringing us together with other people. If we lose even that to AI, we’ll become more efficient than we’ve ever been — and more alone, too.
…
Soft and Softer
I wrote about the new memes of ‘soft off’ and ‘soft on’ days, where people pretend to be working or work at a slower pace, respectively:
I wrote
My hunch is people are building the four-day workweek organically and bottom-up, since their employers aren’t smart enough to institute it as top-down policy.
…
Gaslighting, not career advice
In Suspended Terror,
the main section was about women being gaslighted, and I gathered insights from Ephrat Livni, Tressie McMillan Cottom, and Jessica Grose. An excerpt:
The obstacles that come with working in a sexist culture are beyond any individual’s control. And so advocating a do-it-yourself approach to on-the-job equality may actually be a kind of gaslighting—just one more way for institutions to deflect blame and make women question themselves and doubt their sanity. It’s the society we operate in that needs fixing, not how we ask for money, the tone of our voices, or our outfits.
| Ephrat Livni
Livni’s referenced article, All career advice for women is a form of gaslighting, really says it all.
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Over at Workings.co
This is really for Obsidian nerds. I wrote
where I explore a new plugin and how I use it in my workings.
