A new crop of artificial intelligence tools carries the promise of streamlining tasks, improving efficiency and boosting productivity in the workplace. But that hasn’t been Neil Clarke’s experience so far.
Any tool for productivity improvement is seen by leadership as a way to heap more work onto each individual worker. More work per worker means more profit per hour the worker is paid.
Our economic reality is diametrically opposed to this concept people seem to naively hold of “automation making things easier”, or somehow needing to work less for the same money because “computers are doing it”. No, that benefit does not ever visit the worker, it goes right to the owners.