Will AI Make Us More Productive?
Few things get more hype right now than developments in artificial intelligence.
You can hardly find an app or service that hasn’t built some AI features to seem smart and up-to-date. Here’s some AI to help you write emails! Here’s some AI to break down tasks into subtasks! And here’s an AI chatbot to answer your questions in lieu of a human help desk!
Is all of this mostly noise or a real productivity revolution?
I don’t know nearly enough about “AI”—which is not just one concept or one thing, anyway—to make an informed guess. But I’ll make an uninformed one, based on what I’m observing. 😉
In the field of productivity, the promise of AI is enormous, but right now it’s mostly helpful on the margins.
For example, a browser I really love, Arc, has an AI feature that automatically groups and renames related tabs when your tab situation gets messy. I’m not the sort of person who has three dozen open tabs, but I know many people who do and for whom that feature is really handy.
Another example is that Teachable, the platform on which I host my courses, uses AI to automatically generate subtitles for my videos in many languages. I used to have to pay people to transcribe my videos and that would only be in English. Now I’ve got high-quality subtitles in many languages within minutes.
Also cool: meeting summaries in apps like Zoom and Teams are awesome too. Hey AI, I wasn’t able to attend this meeting—what action items came out of it? Which ones were assigned to me? Just those two things? Okay great, thanks!
I remember when, some years ago, the self-driving car hype was huge. Within years, we’d all be driving cars that would drive themselves and we could just enjoy our time relaxing in the car! (Who am I kidding, we’d spend that time working.)
Unfortunately, it turns out that making cars drive themselves safely is incredibly difficult and there is no discrete jump from human driving to self-driving. Instead, cars are incrementally getting more automation features. Automatic braking when someone jumps in front of the car. Lane assist. Self-parking.
My gut says AI will transform our productivity in the same way: incrementally. Which is fine and still very exciting! If you’ve got a great example of how AI is really making you way more productive, do share.
Oh, one prediction I do feel pretty confident making? AI is not going to take all of our jobs.
Back in 1930, the famous economist John Maynard Keynes suggested that by 2030, we’d all work 15-hour workweeks because our productivity would be so incredibly high that we’d easily be able to meet all of our needs with just a few hours of work each day. Does that look likely to happen?
Keynes was right that our productivity is amazingly high now compared with what is was in 1930. However, he underestimated human desire.
When we become more productive, we use our increased productivity to make more and better stuff. Which is often a very reasonable thing to do. Health care, communication, and transportation are a lot better than they were in 1930 and we all benefit from that.
Anyway, that was an aside.
Whether AI will be as transformative as the steam engine and the Internet remains to be seen. For now, it’s just exciting to watch. If I may make a request of productivity tool developers, though: bring on more and better AI when it helps us get stuff done. Just try not to take that AI hammer and see everything as a nail.