iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Replies

Pavel @spavel.bsky.social · 23/05/2025

The post expands on the thread here, for those interested in the context. AI productivity tools seem like they work when deployed in the squishy ambiguous realm of "strategy" so managers don't realize that during execution, these tools not only fail, but you can *immediately* tell that they failed.

Pavel@spavel.bsky.social

Of course, managers who try to replace their team with AI quickly find that it is completely incapable of passing the same test, for three reasons. One is that AI can *do tasks* but expertise is not just a string of tasks. Two is hallucination; the tasks it does do, it doesn't do well.

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Pavel @spavel.bsky.social · 23/05/2025

But instead of listening to their staff about the problems, these managers simply make the problematic tools mandatory to use, without ever wondering why, if the tool was actually improving productivity, people would push back against it so much. No one had to do a mandate for Excel or PowerPoint.

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Pavel @spavel.bsky.social · 23/05/2025

Things sort of worked when shitty managers managed to a number, i.e. "your new goal is 120% of the old goal, figure it out" because at least the goal bore some relationship to value. The new goal is "number of people using the AI tool we paid a ton of money for." That's not sustainable for long.

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Hagen Blix @hagenblix.bsky.social · 23/05/2025

Imho, one major factor is that the hope isn't productivity increases so much as wage depression/deskilling. It's the hope that these tools will make workers more replaceable, and thus cheaper. And so a lot of it right now is groping around for where that may or may not work

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Amy Elizabeth @amyelizabeth.bsky.social · 23/05/2025

Good lord. I’ve been sitting here thinking about how so many companies had a return to office mandate because managers and executives felt like they needed to see their employees. If AI is doing their work, why are there physical offices?

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