I recently spent the better part of a day at a Silicon Valley tech firm doing some very non-technical work. I can’t tell you what I was doing, because it doesn’t matter, and I can’t say where, but that doesn’t matter either. Trust me: you’re familiar with this tech firm, and trust me, they use AI in their workplace. Heavily.
Besides the fact that where I worked that day doesn’t matter, I won’t say where or what also because I signed a very long NDA before I was allowed entrance to said tech firm. I didn’t read the very long NDA any more than I read my iPhone’s Terms and Conditions while upgrading the operating system, but I’d bet next month’s rent the NDA asked me not to divulge any wheres or whats about my time on site.
In any event, here’s what I saw:
It was late in the afternoon. The attendant who escorted me into the building came to walk me back out (reminding me to turn in my temporary badge, which I nearly forgot to do). And on my way out, I saw tech workers doing tech work.
Sure, they could have been playing RuneScape, which would look the same as regular tech work I suppose, so all I can factually report is that, on my way out of this large office building in a campus of large office buildings, I saw many workers at their desks in front of giant monitors, some of them typing at a keyboard. I also saw many workers hunched over laptops while parked at small cafe-style workstations. It is not unusual for Silicon Valley tech firms to provide workspaces for tech workers who don’t want to do their tech work at their open floorplan desks, which is to say all of them.
In sum, I saw what anyone might see while walking through any one of hundreds, if not thousands of northern California tech outfits. This struck me as very strange indeed. That said, the strangeness of what I witnessed only hit me later that evening when a commercial aired during a football game.
You may have seen the commercial, or one very much like it. The ad features a workplace full of information workers who can type a few words into a chatbot, after which the chatbot generates a polished slide deck, affording coworkers the opportunity to break into interpretive dance.
The commercial ended. My brain was now on fire as I connected what I saw in the ad with what I saw at the tech firm earlier that day. So many questions! The only option then, was to pause the game until I had captured some of those questions.
Here are the top five that I’ve been grappling with ever since, and I’m passing these along to see if any of these have occurred to you as well:
If AI is helping me (or my team/department) get more done in less time, then where the eff is my four-day workweek?
Oh, and I’m not talking about filing those four days with the same 40 hours worked prior to AI. If we’re still working 40 hours, then the AI isn’t helping with productivity, is it? We’re talking about 32 hours a week. At most.
Because if, as promised by AI’s most vocal supporters, the technology will let you make something like a slide deck in 20 minutes, and that’s a something which, before AI would have taken 4-8 hours of labor… now what? Do you get to dip out after finishing the slide deck? Get to catch the afternoon baseball game from the outfield bleachers? How exactly are you supposed to fill your day that would have otherwise been filled making a slide deck? If an AI can make a presentation deck in 20 minutes (18-19 of which is probably you tweaking the prompt), then you can easily create three slide decks every hour. Are you supposed to make 24 slide decks instead of one? And are you still giving one presentation, or are you now giving a presentation for each slide deck you can make?
And if the answer is still one presentation, how exactly is AI helping your company?
If AI is helping the company become more profitable by cranking out more widgets, then how much of that additional profit is being taken home by the workers using the tool that creates that profit?
As we consider question two, let’s suppose you work for an insurance company. Let’s further suppose that the widget in this case is processing an insurance claim. If AI can help you process twice the number of claims in a month than you can without the aid of AI, then you’re creating twice as much profit for the insurance company. Right?
So in return for doubling your contribution to the bottom line, how much of that goes into your bank account? Is the insurance company doubling your salary because of your doubled output? I assume that before AI, if you had a performance review and demonstrated you’d doubled your contributions in the past year, you’d be in line for a significant raise. Right?
Alternatively, ask this of the manager who asked/instructed you to use AI for your insurance claim processing: did your salary double in the last year?
If your manager’s salary doubled and yours didn’t, that would certainly suck for you, but at least there’s a case to be made that the manager earned the raise - they saw an opportunity to increase the throughput of insurance claim processing with a new tool.
No matter who gets credit for the doubling of widgets created, it’s worth knowing whose salary is being doubled. And if the answer is “nobody,” then why not?
If AI will indeed let me (or this department) make more widgets in less time, where are all the customers who are supposed to consume the products?
Let’s go back to the slide deck example. If I can make 20 slide decks in the same time it would have taken me to make one prior to Copilot or Claude, then where are the people who are going to sit through 20 presentations rather than one? If there isn’t an audience willing to spend every waking hour sitting though presentations, then what good is the tool that makes the presentations?
In fact, call this question the Marie Kondo question. You likely know Kondo from her show and/or bestselling book. She has those things not because humans haven’t figured out how to make clothing cheaply and quickly. It’s because humans have figured this out. We make clothing so effortlessly that we end up with literal mountains of it in our closets and our garages.
Same goes for slide decks or lines of code or shitty event flyers. Sure, I can create mountains of text and images with the plagiarism machine, but there are only so many hours in the day. Yes, there are idiots on Substack who think that you will happily read their chatbot output, but in general, what am I supposed to do with the 19 slide decks that just don’t, as Marie Kondo herself might say, “spark joy?”
If AI will let me do the work of two people (or three, or four), then how many years of salary will be paid to the people who are no longer needed?
Let’s assume the Marie Kondo question is a bit of a conundrum. Yes, you can process twice as many insurance claims as you could prior to AI, and so can 10 of your coworkers, and so can the 1000 additional claims processors your company employs, but there are only so many insurance claims to be processed in the world, you know? The population of the earth isn’t going to double overnight, know what I mean?
So if the amount of widgets that can be made and consumed is relatively fixed and finite, who gets made redundant? You? The guy sitting at the desk next to yours? Yes, the guy next to you eats at his desk more than he should (that’s what break rooms are for!), but the guy next to you has a family he’s providing for, same as you. His kids need braces, too. You and that guy next to you have way more in common than not. And so it’s probably best that the two of you cooperate.
Last one:
Who is accountable when the AI makes an error or cannot solve some future issue?
If the chatbot helps you create 2x or 10x of the widgets you made before your manager told you to “do AI,” will the manager be held accountable for any errors the AI makes? What job and income protections do you have for a mistake? Or, do all AI-related gains in profit accrue to the manager and/or executives of the company, while all AI-related liabilities fall onto the backs of employees holding the least institutional power?
These are not rhetorical questions! Grab that guy next to you, invite him to eat lunch with you in the break room (a win win!) and get discussing!
After all, where else are these questions going to come up? Do you think your company’s Board of Directors is kicking off their next meeting by addressing any of these matters? Are you going to type these into the Q&A chat during the next all-hands?
No! And hell no!
These are questions to get you thinking, yes, but more importantly, they’re meant to get you doing. Seriously: talk these questions over the next time your office has a waffle day. And if you can’t come up with solid answers to all five of the questions I obsessed over after seeing that commercial, then you and your coworker are left with but one choice.
Start a union. And then start demanding answers.