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 don’t think improved performance has ever lead to shorter workdays. So, I’d say it’s in favor of employees to keep AI use secret. Shorter workdays comes from legislation, which I guess is created after some kind of protest.
It has led to me wasting less time thinking about things, that’s for sure. I can slack off a whole lot more these days thanks to GPT. I support all of us being a bit more lazy. I frequently tell our junior devs to chill out or they risk burning out, and if something like GPT, CodeWhisper, or Autopilot can reduce the mental load, I’m all for it. We still need experts or the output is garbage, but simplifying the process is just fantastic.
Efficiency benefits never get passed to the worker. When effeciency improves the worker is eliminated to keep workload “optimum” (from the company’s perspective) and reduce costs.
Automate what you can of your job and never, ever share those productivity hacks with your boss.
Oh I would absolutely never tell my boss how many of the docs I’ve written the last few months were primarily authored by GPT. I am blatantly clear that I’m (and MANY others) are using AI for writing code, but taking my specific knowledge and asking for blurbs about X for the docs is just hands down amazing.