I'm 37 and I used to think AI would make people more productive - now I think it mostly exposes how much of modern work was never meaningful to begin with - Silicon Canals

"The tools work. They write the email. They draft the report. They build the deck. But the surprising thing isn't how good they are at it. The surprising thing is how easily they do it, and what that easiness has started to reveal. A lot of the work was never that hard. It was just laborious."

"Drafting an email that's mostly polite acknowledgment. Summarizing a meeting where not much was decided. Writing the introduction and conclusion of a report someone needs to file. Producing a slide deck with the standard sections in the standard order. Generating the briefing document that everyone will read for thirty seconds and then forget. The model can do these things in seconds because they were always patternable."

"The structure was conventional. The vocabulary was predictable. The actual content was usually filler dressed up to look like a deliverable. None of this is a criticism of the people who produced these things for years. They were doing what was asked of them, and most of them did it competently. But the work was the kind of work that the model can replicate because it never required much that was unique to the person doing it."

"If a sufficiently average prediction machine can produce your output in thirty seconds, the output was never really the thing. What this is exposing about modern work I've started to think AI isn't a productivity revolution. It's an x-ray. It's showing what's actually there."

AI tools can draft emails, reports, slide decks, and briefing documents in seconds. The surprising aspect is not only their accuracy but how easily they produce these outputs. Much of the work people perform is described as laborious rather than hard, with conventional structure and predictable vocabulary. The content is often characterized as filler arranged to resemble a deliverable. Because these tasks are patternable and require little unique input, an average prediction system can replicate them quickly. This leads to the view that AI is not primarily a productivity revolution, but an x-ray that exposes what modern work actually contains.

Read at Silicon Canals