Photo by max laurell.
We have officially entered the tree-falling-in-forest-era of white-collar work. Our friend who is a big dude in fundraising just declared the end of the pitch deck. He pointed to decks that were auto-generated and then auto-summarized. And asserted that if no one is writing it and no one is reading it, there’s just no point at all in having that piece of collateral.
Over here in management-training land, our bosses are so busy reading the summaries of all the meetings they didn’t attend, there’s no time for anything else on their calendars. They ask to send notetakers to management training in their stead. Or get a summary of what they missed. We get it. Genuinely, there’s more to do than there are hours in the day.
The problem is that the summary approach falls way down on implementation. Leadership transformation nerds will tell you there is no growth or development without reflection. So if we send you a summary of management training that says: Reflect on how you’re showing up as a leader and where the tools you are deploying are in service of you, your team, your org. And where they are not. You can read the summary meant to prompt reflection but that is not the same as doing any actual reflecting.
Faster, sure. But comically ineffective for the stated task.
The comedy era of automation. Where an entire meeting is attended by notetakers but no participants. And if you’re quick to point out that surely, of all meetings, this meeting could have been an email. Take a beat and pull it all the way through. Too busy to write that email? Just generate it instead. And if you’re too busy to read any of your email? Well, there’s a tool for that, too. Here at the bottom, we find ourselves back at the top. What is the point of auto-generating only to auto-summarize?
Recursive malfunction
It’s ok to want to be productive at work. It’s even cool to work on a thing you care about and want to see happen in the world. And it’s not a problem to use tools in the course of your work. But there’s a point where we tip from productivity gains into losses. More notes from more meetings that no one attends does not make us a more productive workforce. More emails that no one reads doesn’t mean more alignment or shared context or a smarter workforce.
This is silliness. This is the output of work without any of the inputs. This is sound. And fury.
And there’s no fucking point to any of it.
We’ve all worked with someone, usually a junior person. Often an intern. First to sign on in the morning. Last to clock out at the end of the day. And, when pressed about how they spent their time, they attended a lot of meetings. Read all of the emails in their inbox. Caught up on slack. And that was about it.
No one, not a single manager who has been at it for more than 10 minutes, points to that person as the most productive member of the team. An invaluable contributor. If you’re being generous, you say that person is coming up to speed. That they’re learning. And at some point, you pull them aside and talk about the difference between the theater of work and actual work.
Because the wonderful part about goals and objectives and even mission statements is that we know what we’re trying to get done. No organization has a quarterly goal around sending more email (maybe Mailchimp does). Or sitting in the most meetings (maybe Zoom does). But unless it’s your core business, those are tools you use to achieve the thing, not the thing itself.
This is the dream
The people pitching all this will totally acknowledge that the current version is ridiculous. Well. Not all of them. Some of them are so heartbreakingly earnest about their blog-slop, or design-slop, or pitchdeck-slop, and can’t understand why you’re not impressed. Those ones seem to have a lot of time to post on LinkedIn.
But like, many of them, the more polished ones, can admit that this is all still sort of silly. For those folks, the nonsense is an intermediate stage. Sure, having bots attend each other’s meetings is silly, but it doesn’t really matter, and it’s on the way to eliminating the need for meetings altogether. And yes, the bots aren’t doing a very good job at creative output yet, but, you know…for now we’ll have the humans come in and clean up the mess. And in 3-5 years we probably won’t need the humans at all. At least, this is the dream.
That dream is rooted in a worldview. It’s a worldview we should talk about because it’s not only the root of the slop showing up in your feeds, but it’s also the root of the pressure to make your work into slop. The people who hold this worldview have been working hard to distribute and accelerate it. When Eric Schmidt talks about the “San Francisco Consensus,” it sounds like he’s talking about a set of AI predictions, but it’s clear he’s also talking about this.
We’ve never seen them crisply articulate it, we don’t get invited to their group chats, but empirically it’s roughly:
- Companies exist to make money, and the most money goes to people who can find leverage — maximum impact per unit cost.
- Humans are a major cost.
- Most employees are over-entitled and under-accountable and have an inflated sense of their own worth. This is particularly true for people in creative fields — writing, design, art direction — or those with a background in humanities.
- Most work is also bullshit. Especially communication and coordination work — meetings, presentations, management conversations. Those things keep people from doing their real work, by which we generally mean lone genius individual contribution.
- Automating away the bullshit work is righteous because that work has no value.
- Automating away the humans is righteous because it will reduce the dependence on entitled employees, and produce an appropriate level of fear/obedience in the ones who remain.
- The coolest thing in the world would be to build a billion-dollar company as a single person running an army of AI bots.
The major LLM vendors don’t say these things, but it’s implicit in a lot of how they talk about their offerings. No sensible leader would pay earth dollars for a bot that transcribes silent meetings with other bots, or tells you how much house paint to add to your chocolate chip cookies. But when those companies sell the promise of saving on payroll costs, people are buying the dream. When new benchmarks drop showing which human certification tests the chatbots can now pass, what human work they can now sort of do, people are buying.
If you’re bought into the worldview above, this is the dream.
This is a nightmare
If this is the dream, we don’t want it.
Like so much LLM output it’s not even very creative, just derivative and beige and vaguely unsettling. There’s nothing here that isn’t age-old grievances of business owners about their employees, dressed up in some scraps of poorly understood organizational psychology and modern finance. They aren’t re-inventing work, they’re re-inventing shit work. Because this? None of this is how great work happens.
Remember great work? Genuinely great, thriving team, trusting each other, flow-state, catching the pass, you make me better and I make you better, holy shit I can’t believe we pulled that off, years later the people from that team are out in the world doing amazing things and making each other proud? Remember great fucking work?
You don’t get that by removing the humanity, or the humans. It’s hard work to run a team or an organization well, we know, but the temptation to reach for some quick fix at the expense of your people never works out. If your teams are underperforming, there are concrete steps you can take. If you have an accountability problem, fix your management. The solution to your shit meetings is to run better ones. These are all skills you can build, but you won’t get them by skipping the hard parts and skimming a summary.
Building a billion-dollar company alone with your bots is not the coolest thing in the world. It’s honestly a pretty sad and lonely image, and relies on a massive amount of damage along the way to make it possible. But building something enduring, something with real impact in the world, alongside a team of folks you trust and believe in, and who trust and believe in you, and bringing out the best in each other? Yeah, that’s the dream.
— Melissa & Johnathan
