AI is supercharging fake work
14 comments
> The logical implication of this is that AI’s overall impact on the workforce is really going to come down to the composition of fake work vs. real work that already existed.
Setting aside a critical and ironic problem, I think this is very sharp and worth keeping in mind. It’s testable, logical, and not really bound to whatever the ragged frontier happens to be.
The problem is how do we find a good proxy for this?!
Setting aside a critical and ironic problem, I think this is very sharp and worth keeping in mind. It’s testable, logical, and not really bound to whatever the ragged frontier happens to be.
The problem is how do we find a good proxy for this?!
It’s hard to evaluate or even define “fake” work from any kind of data-driven perspective since you can always take the stance that it accomplishes some unobservable goal and is therefore done for a good reason. I think a lot of people don’t believe it exists for this reason, but as basically anyone that’s worked a corporate middle manager job knows, it definitely does it exist.
Exactly. Sorry I didn't reply to this earlier, because it's dead on. there's an old paper from a professor that Harvard gave tenure to before realizing that he was an actual communist lmao titled "What do bosses do?" (https://elearning.unite.it/pluginfile.php/356459/mod_resourc...) Spoiler: not much.
There's lots of real invisible work that isn't measured for actual good reasons. But 100-1000x that work is just bullshit and is distributed throughout middle management. I think you're right. I think AI is gonna pull that out in weird ways, exposing it in one place, amplifying it in another.
There's lots of real invisible work that isn't measured for actual good reasons. But 100-1000x that work is just bullshit and is distributed throughout middle management. I think you're right. I think AI is gonna pull that out in weird ways, exposing it in one place, amplifying it in another.
So funny how all the AI developers kept saying: "Don't worry, you won't lose your jobs, you won't lose your jobs..."
Showing how disconnected they are from the people who actually make decisions at companies.
Showing how disconnected they are from the people who actually make decisions at companies.
maxothex(1)
EigenFluxAI(1)
1. Many (possibly most) people at major tech companies spend most of their time doing essentially fake work, which may or may not be actually negatively impacting productivity. Think time spent in pre-meeting meetings for the many layers of WBRs and MBRs on the product side and over-engineering workflows to get promoted on the tech side.* There are many reasons that people have speculated for why these kinds of jobs exist but in my experience, this basically just comes down to gaming the optics of productivity. True productivity is nearly impossible to evaluate so proxies are used and proxies are inevitably gamed (lines of code, meeting attendance, how many people report to you, etc.).
2. AI is really good at generating fake work. We’re starting to see some of the repercussions of the tech-side of AI slop as Amazon apparently is formally addressing some of the engineering issues it’s causing. but on the non-tech side, there’s endless amounts of doc slop and increasingly Slack slop, all filled with emoji-bulleted lists and em-dashes. The maddening part of doc slop is that you really have no idea what the person intended to say so you can never be sure you’re truly responding to them or just what they thought looked good. I suspect a good amount of performance “reviews” now are just managers doc-slopping their way through and stumbling through an oration of whatever ChatGPT spit out.
3. Whether a company benefits from AI comes down to whether the enhanced fake work undercuts the enhanced real work. At companies where personal advancement comes through optics, meeting-scheduling, public-Slack-channel posting, “visibility”, etc. the doc slop and Slack slop are going to be absolutely out of control. These companies are likely rent-extractors that face limited competition, are public, and don’t have much innovation left. They’ve probably been absorbing a hefty amount of fake work for years. I don’t think there’s any way AI helps these kinds of companies and it will likely make it hard for anyone doing real work to stand out and get rewarded. AI is never going to enhance productivity at these places, because people were never really trying to be productive to begin with. On the other hand, companies where visibility/optics/fake work isn’t rewarded but boosting hard metrics like revenue or signing new clients is, AI could help and probably actually replace people. I can’t deny that AI has some real productivity-enhancing abilities IF you are actually trying to enhance productivity, I’ve seen this firsthand.
The logical implication of this is that AI’s overall impact on the workforce is really going to come down to the composition of fake work vs. real work that already existed. In my mind, the economy was never set up to benefit from anything truly productivity enhancing because the amount of fake work so drastically outweighed the amount of real work to begin with.
* The latter ironically leads to real work, which is fixing the over-engineered workflows that fail constantly because the engineer that over-engineered them left after he got promoted for over-engineering.