AI & Your Relationship with Work
The inevitable post about ChatGPT, and what it means to accomplish a task.
I’m traveling this week, but here’s a brief thought that’s been rattling around in my head the past few months.
In the great proliferation of op-ed, podcast, twitter, and newsletter takes on generative AI and chat bots like ChatGPT, the comment that has lingered with me the longest over the past few months is this: it’s not that AI will replace lawyers, but lawyers who use AI will replace those who don’t.
What I heard was - people who tend to view their professions as somewhat buffered from technological encroachment need to listen up.
For example, this a selection of headlines from *just one* WSJ newsletter I recently received:
From CEOs to Coders, Employees Experiment With New AI Programs
BuzzFeed to Use ChatGPT Creator OpenAI to Help Create Quizzes and Other Content
AI in the Workplace Is Already Here. The First Battleground? Call Centers
While I’m interested in all the ways that AI may change how work actually gets done in different professions, I’m more interested in how AI may change our relationship with the work we do.
Consider a distinction between two types of working activity - “telic” vs “atelic”:
“Projects are telic activities, in that they aim at terminal states, not yet achieved. (The term comes from the Greek word telos, meaning “end” or “goal.”) These activities aim at their own annihilation. You’re preparing that client pitch and then presenting it; negotiating that deal and then closing it; planning the conference and then hosting it. Reaching the goal brings a moment of satisfaction, but after that, it’s on to the next project.
Other activities are atelic, without a built-in end. Think of the difference between walking home and going for a stroll, or between putting the kids to bed and parenting. When you engage in atelic activities, you do not exhaust them. Nor do they evoke the emptiness of projects, for which fulfillment is always in the future or the past. Atelic activities are fully realized in the present.”
It seems to me that much of the work we do is telic, or goal-oriented. With knowledge work, we sit down with some task we need to get done and then type away until we’ve completed it. If you’ve spent even one minute playing with ChatGPT, then you know that typing in order to accomplish some type of thought work is something this tool can do (mimic?) incredibly well. Give AI a task and it can accomplish the task (e.g., GPT-4 Passes the Bar Exam).
So if AI continues to expand and take over goal-oriented activity in the world of work, what will it mean for this significant source of meaning and identity in our lives?
Here’s a related experience I had recently.
Toward the beginning of this year, I put together a book proposal for an idea I’ve been planning to write about - a pop-press primer for people who are newly promoted into leadership positions. I sent it out to about 40 agents and while I did not secure an agent, I had a few conversations and learned something interesting in the process.
What I learned was this - agents very frequently pair new pop-press nonfiction writers with ghostwriters. This helps them sell a proposal to a publisher by ensuring the writing will be of a certain quality. So the advice I got was that if I wanted to write a pop-press book, I should work with a ghostwriter to put together a high quality proposal and pitch myself as a writing team to agents and publishers.
This advice raised a question for me that I’ve been noodling on since - is my aim here to engage in more of a telic activity (i.e., get a book published) or an atelic activity (i.e., writing). Am I trying to write a book, with all the effort and anguish that can entail? Or am I trying to get an object created that’s shaped like a book and has my name on it?
Could I just use a generative AI tool like ChatGPT as my ghostwriter to get something written? How would that change the quality of my relationship to the work?
For some reason this has all brought to mind one of the oddest lines in the very odd (very excellent) book If on a winter’s night a traveler by Italo Calvino: “I read, therefore it writes.”
How do you imagine AI may impact your work?
The recent AI fake of the Drake/Weeknd song “Heart on My Sleeve” raises exactly these questions.
“The question is, as a society, do we care what Drake really feels or is it enough to just hear a superficially intelligent rendering?”
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/19/arts/music/ai-drake-the-weeknd-fake.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare
Check out my newest post - thinking a bit about how AI may impact the identity-shaping elements of our work. Found a few good articles, but would love any other essays on this if anybody can point in that direction.