I have a confession…I like to work.
Yet, I find myself in rare company these days as so many seek to use AI to ‘do the work’ instead of collaborating to do ‘your best work’.
I think that’s gonna be a big problem and I have some thoughts on that.
Before GPT
The first time I used a generative AI tool was back in early 2023 when a colleague introduced me to a platform called GPT 2.5 from, at the time, a little known company called OpenAI.
ChatGPT didn’t exist yet.
This was it’s basic form before we experienced life through a prompt bar. The only people who were playing around at this point were nerds like me. After I got around the not so friendly interface, I saw the impact of this tech’s early potential.
At that time, I kept thinking this would be a great way to collaborate with technology to do better work.
What I couldn’t see at that point, or perhaps didn’t want to recognise, is humanities desire for instant gratification and the obsession to outsource/delegate every piece of work. The current AI marketing from all corners of the industry leans on this sense of ‘work is bad, so let AI do it for you’. I know that sounds like some weird slogan from a commercial in the 60’s.
The purpose of work
I get a great deal of value from my AI tool stack.
Perhaps I’m the weird one but my focus with AI is to help me to my best work, not outsource it.
The work, very much like learning, is where the hard stuff happens.
The ‘aha’ moments you would never have conceived without the focused effort, the seemingly unrelated events that craft a connective bridge of ideas which lead to something incredible.
My industry of workplace learning has/had a saying “Learning is the work and the work is learning” – its something like that.
It seems like too many of us have fallen out of love with doing the work.
Again, the problem isn’t AI, it’s us.
Our intentions have become skewed in the promise of an era where an artificial intelligence will do anything and everything for you. Yet, we rarely sit back to ask “Just because we can, does it mean we should?”, and even if we can, do we really want to?
Doing ‘the work’ is a big part of purpose for many.
Purpose, meaning and fulfilment is a dumpster on fire that is quickly rolling across society as we race to delegate, automate and outsource everything in the pursuit of “reclaiming time” or “Being efficient”.
We may not see it now, but its coming.
A bit of effort, struggle and focus is not bad for you, so don’t discount “Doing the work”.
“If you don’t make mistakes, you’re not working on hard enough problems and that’s a big mistake.” – Frank Wilczek
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