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One of the joys of our day can be scratching a big, fat line through an item on our to-do list. Digital task lists even try to replicate this pen-and-paper moment because of the satisfaction it provides. We like to get things done.
But entrepreneur and corporate advisor Faisal Hoque says artificial intelligence is going to diminish our sense of “I did this!” As AI continues to develop and we become more comfortable using it, more and more of our cognitive work will get offloaded to digital helpers.
“But what is then left for us? When AI handles most of the items that normally populate our to-do list, where will we find satisfaction and meaning in our work?” he writes in Psychology Today.
Get set to feel distanced from your work in an AI Age. Human beings derive satisfaction from effort and creation. Psychologists, in what is known as the IKEA effect, have found we value things more when we build them ourselves.
“But AI allows us to have the product without going through the process. We’re left with output – often excellent output – but without the pride, the ownership, the sense of accomplishment that comes from having truly created something. And this strips away a crucial part of what makes work satisfying in the first place: The effort that goes into making it, the effort that allows us to say: I did that,” he says.
We will have to see our work more as orchestrating and less as doing. But that means no longer seeing success as completing an item on our task list – which probably has not been the best gauge of meaningful accomplishment anyway.
“Instead of asking, ‘What tasks did I complete today?’ we must shift to asking: ‘What changed because of my work today?’ Who did I help? What problem did I solve? What became possible? And when we ask the new questions, it becomes irrelevant whether AI drafted an email or not, because what matters isn’t who wrote the first draft, it’s whether the final result created value for someone who needed it,” he says.
Neuroscientist and consultant David Rock sees an even deeper and more dangerous impact as AI strips away many of our daily mental burdens: We will be surrendering part of our ability at cognition itself. He points to the ability to skip a meeting and rely on an AI summary, which many of us are joyfully latching onto.
“Sending an AI agent to a meeting may rob us of one of the most impactful experiences for the human brain: Focusing on ideas with other people in real time. Being in the presence of others, even in virtual settings, increases the strength of our attention on those ideas and the neural circuits that support the ideas,” he writes in Harvard Business Review.
Neuroscience has found that when we focus on ideas in the company of others we encode the information in our brain more deeply. That happens because we are paying close attention to social signals such as who is speaking, how others respond and what that might mean for our own group standing. As well as activating the brain, when we’re thinking and processing with others we begin to build a shared understanding. Neural synchrony occurs, an alignment of the brain’s electrical signals.
“We don’t get this effect of attention, or the activation of robust neural circuits, by reading an AI-generated summary of a meeting. It’s similar to the way reading the CliffsNotes version of a novel doesn’t give us the same experience as reading the actual book. We might grasp the plot, but we miss the richness, depth and characters that make it memorable,” he says.
Beyond that, we can even lose the power and joy of developing our own insights that comes from tackling a challenging work problem. Sure, we find out the solution but relying on the summary robs us of the cognitive challenge and robs others of our input. “We may need to pause to reflect on what we’re outsourcing – not just in terms of tasks, but in terms of thinking itself,” he warns.
Quick hits
- Consultant Tim Duggan says five skills you need to get a promotion are judgment, storytelling, collaborative intelligence, the ability to handle conflict, and, perhaps the hardest, unlearning -- the art of deliberately letting go of habits, processes, frameworks and ways of thinking that no longer fit the current environment.
- Leadership coach Irina Stanescu offers these three examples of when you are being nice to people but actually unkind because it avoids helping them for the longer run: Not sharing honest feedback; overlooking small mistakes repeatedly; and avoiding disagreements to keep the peace.
- The only controllable variable in any situation, Ottawa thought leader Shane Parish notes, is you. Oddly, he adds, it’s the last one we adjust.
Harvey Schachter is a Kingston-based writer specializing in management issues. He, along with Sheelagh Whittaker, former CEO of both EDS Canada and Cancom, are the authors of When Harvey Didn’t Meet Sheelagh: Emails on Leadership.