Did you hear? Claude now has a feature that provides insights into how you’re using it. Like, patterns about time of day, what sort of tasks you give it, what your collaboration style is.
It also lets you set No-Claude hours and sometimes asks what you’d like to keep doing yourself instead of offloading to AI. Yes, you heard that right: a commercial product is actively encouraging you not to use it all the time.
When Claude is hinting you have a problem with Claude … well, maybe listen to that.
I’m sure the economics of compute supply and demand plays a role in the nudge to lay off the AI awhile. Not to be overlooked, though, is the increasing drumbeat that AI is making us dumber by allowing us to outsource critical thought and decision-making. It’s hard not to notice the fallout at school, at work, and throughout your social feeds.
Thinking, in general, is hard and not always the most pleasant way to spend time. It gets even harder when you’re bombarded by never-before-seen circumstances that have to be carefully thought through, too.
Walk into your office, where you’re being told to learn a bunch of new skills there’s no handbook for. You’re expected to experiment and create that on the fly. You’re also told to AI-ify every possible task, except your technical systems aren’t really set up for it and AI’s not terribly good at judgment decisions yet. So you’ve either got to redo a lot of the work or resign yourself to slop because you can’t be perceived as having your productivity slip.
Let’s not even get started on the rest of your day. Sky-high gasoline and grocery prices. A kajillion family obligations. The growing push for everyone to run a side hustle. Whatever fresh hell is on the news.
It’s … a lot to think about. And at some point, because you’re only human, you’re gonna take the path of least resistance where you can. Cue: Mountains of slop on social media, outsourced decision-making at work, and online security holes the size of Cleveland.
The long wait
I have very conflicted feelings about all this.
I do believe it’ll sort out eventually. The disruption will die down, and the skills that seem daunting today won’t be tomorrow. The slop issue won’t go away completely, but there’s a pretty firm conviction shaping up that humans need to do the lion’s share of what makes knowledge work effective. AI can maybe speed up some of the tedious workflow bits. It’s also democratized the developer-code pieces that were a barrier for many. But at the end of the day, the recipe for success is about authenticity, ingenuity, judgment, and human connection. And, yeah, new jobs will emerge, just like with every new technology.
What I worry about are the people who don’t have the luxury of waiting it out.
The ones who are just getting out of school, saddled with loans they thought would be offset by a career path that was gainful at the time they chose it.
The ones who are too young to retire and too old not to fall victim to age discrimination.
The ones who got laid off and are now playing musical chairs for the decreasing number of roles in their field.
The ones whose identity is tied up in a core skill set that’s now a hobby, forcing them to reinvent into something new and possibly not as lucrative or fulfilling.
The ones who refuse to come to terms with reinvention and vow to stick it out kicking and screaming and shaking their fists.
There isn’t a path of least resistance for any of these circumstances. Unless you count giving up, which many have done. And the plethora of socio-economic problems with AI simply rubs salt in the wound. Why are we doing so much damage to so many people with a technology that’s doing so much damage right back at us?
It’s a fair question.
Shifting tides
Hmm. I seem to be Debbie Downer today. And speaking of, I don’t think there are easy answers or fast fixes to the AI-driven bombardment we’re enduring.
But I do see glimmers of hope. The Claude insights feature, for one. Also, OpenAI’s decision to optimize ChatGPT’s desktop app for work tasks and not as a glorified search engine. And, shockingly, Meta’s speedy rollback of the auto-opt-in feature that would have turned Instagram into a deepfake and non-consensual porn factory.
Clearly, there are ulterior economic motives. But that means the economics are shifting.
In the working world, for example, we’re moving toward acknowledging that the goal of AI isn’t to 100% automate humans. The chaotic crunch knowledge workers are caught in right now is part of the growing pains in deciding what’s automated, what’s accelerated, and what’s left alone.
Outside of work, I predict we’re also gonna see an explosion in open-source and locally hosted AI tools that are fully capable of doing the glorified-search-engine and organize-my-calendar parts of life without the cost and privacy concerns of wondering whether your personal photos will end up compromised by auto-opt-in tools you didn’t know about.
So, as it starts to get clearer what our new, AI-enhanced lives will look like (at least in the short term), the folks stuck in the middle will also have a clearer understanding of what direction to head next. This accursed hiring cycle will also start to shift as companies realize what AI can and can’t do, and the new roles that are needed.
But if you’re waiting it out for the Big Bosses to admit they were wrong, rehire everyone they laid off, and reboot back to the way it was before … that’s not gonna happen.
We’ve seen the same pattern with personal computers, the Internet, social media, and mobile phones, just in the past few decades. Like AI, these technologies have their good and bad sides, but you can’t dispute that they’ve fundamentally changed how people go about their daily lives and their work.
It’s not going back to the way it was pre-AI. And I think that’s ultimately a good thing.
All opinions here are my own. All text is my own, too, including the em dashes. I welcome constructive comments and discussion on LinkedIn and Bluesky.
Leave a Reply