Why Does Everyone Want Me To Use AI To Do My Job?

Our knowledge and skills live and die by use. “Use it or lose it” really is the name of the game, and anyone with experience learning a second language or a musical instrument can attest to the fact that skills atrophy quickly without use. This, as Nicholas Carr puts it in The Glass Cage, is the degeneration effect. Leave a skill alone for too long and those neurons get put to work doing other things. Our fingers don’t move quite as quickly over the fretboard. Our brain doesn’t find the right word. Our accent gets worse.

But this doesn’t just happen with skills we try to learn as adults. Most of us have become terrible at navigating without the GPS on our phones, to the point of helplessness, as we’ve come to rely on that technology every time we hop in the car or walk downtown.

The question at the heart of The Glass Cage — and it’s an especially pertinent one in our “AI for everything” moment — is what tasks we’re willing to hand over to automation, what skills we’re willing to lose. The use of “we” is a little misleading, of course, as the average person isn’t deciding this for themselves after writing out an exhaustive pros and cons list. Instead, we tend to experience an enormous amount of pressure to use certain of-the-moment technology. Right now, in many professions, workers are being asked to embrace AI tools and use them for the expected (though not always proven) productivity gains these tools will enable.