A Wharton professor believes that businesses should motivate their employees to share their individual AI-enhanced productivity hacks, despite the prevalent practice of hiding these tactics due to corporate restrictions.
Worker’s Use of AI and Secrecy:
- Employees are increasingly using AI tools, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, to boost their personal productivity and manage multiple jobs.
- However, due to strict corporate rules against AI use, these employees often keep their AI usage secret.
Issues with Corporate Restrictions:
- Companies tend to ban AI tools because of privacy and legal worries.
- These restrictions result in workers being reluctant to share their AI-driven productivity improvements, fearing potential penalties.
- Despite the bans, employees often find ways to circumvent these rules, like using their personal devices to access AI tools.
Proposed Incentives for Disclosure:
- The Wharton professor suggests that companies should incentivize employees to disclose their uses of AI.
- Proposed incentives could include shorter workdays, making the trade-off beneficial for both employees and the organization.
Anticipated Impact of AI:
- Generative AI is projected to significantly transform the labor market, particularly affecting white-collar and college-educated workers.
- As per a Goldman Sachs analysis, this technology could potentially affect 300 million full-time jobs and significantly boost global labor productivity.
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I think the big problem is that if you find a way to automate your work or make it more efficient, your reward is more likely to be more work at the same pay, or even being replaced with AI tools and a new hire. You are incentivized to lie about it and pretend you are working.
Proposed incentives could include shorter workdays, making the trade-off beneficial for both employees and the organization.
Oh, how nice it must be to be so naive. Just as every other technological advancement that increases worker productivity has not led to the worker working less (only producing more in the same time, for no added benefit to the worker), this won’t benefit the worker either. It’s nice to say you could make the workday shorter, but your saying so makes it hurt all the more when you don’t make it shorter because more wealth can be stolen by keeping it the same.
On a similar note, I wouldn’t disclose my use to my employer for the reason that they’ll see increased productivity and do what always happens to more productive employees: punish them with more work. The more productive you are the more work you’re given to do. Hard work is not rewarded, it’s punished–with more work.
The phrase “boost global labor productivity” always disgusts me when it’s just a thin veil over “quicken wealth extraction through exploitation”.
