Hey everyone, so this is something new I'm trying. I'm just recording directly onto Substack, and I'm going to try to turn this into a newsletter.
The thing I wanted to talk about—this won't take much time, I promise—is that when AI tools came over the horizon, we were hearing a lot about how they're going to make people more productive. And there were studies to this effect. There is at least one study by McKinsey, which predicted a productivity growth of 0.1 to 0.6% by 2040 from AI use. But 2040 is far away, and until now, we haven't seen that. In fact, we may actually be seeing the opposite because a recent study done by Intel says that productivity is actually down.
They followed 6,000 employees in Germany, France, and the UK and found that AI PC owners were spending longer on digital chores than using traditional PCs. The reason behind this, of course, is that you cannot hold AI tools accountable. If you are someone who has AI tools, who has a workplace where AI tools are being used to achieve something, you can't fire an AI tool. In fact, you're paying money to use the AI tool; you're paying money to the company that made the AI tool. At the end of the day, the person you can hold responsible, the person you can hold accountable, is your employee. You can tell them that if this job does not get done, your job is on the line. You can't say that to an AI tool.
So, the work at the end of the day is still being done by someone who's using the AI tool. And now, while earlier they just had to do the job, now they have to train the AI to do the job, make the AI do the job, and check what the AI has done. And in some cases, probably many cases, fix the mistakes being made by the AI.
I myself have tried to use AI tools to do some jobs that I don't like to do. And in every single case, it has to be checked. In every single case, it has to be fixed. So, Intel thinks this is a problem of employees not knowing how to use the tools. I think that short of AI becoming agents in their own right, where they take decisions and perform tasks and are proactive, we're not going to solve this problem. And that the buck will continue to stop at humans and the humans who hire them to do work.
That's what I wanted to talk about. Thank you very much for listening. I don't know how this will turn out, but we will see. Thanks.
