Rebecca Hinds: observation

Transcript context

…Yeah, that's interesting. The idea that I do have this experience sometimes. One thing I've been really enjoying doing lately is creating songs for each episode of the podcast. You can start thinking about if you want to request a genre. I try, but I can't always promise to be able to make something great in any given genre. It's really striking how sometimes I'll just run my kind of produce episode Claude code skill, which includes coming up with an idea for a song, writing lyrics, prompting Suno with that. Sometimes I show up and it's like banger immediately. And then other times I find myself sitting there and it is this kind of black box thing where you're like, you know, I tweak the style prompt, maybe I tweak the lyrics a little bit, go again. And for some reason it's just not working. It's just not landing. It's just not giving me what I want. And that can be definitely a sort of exhausting thing, especially because sometimes I get in this spot where I'm like, who even cares about these Like, am I doing this for anyone? Although actually I do get remarkably a lot of positive commentary on the songs. Anyway, I can relate to that sort of exhaustion point. I can definitely also relate to the shoveling context point. I used to have before my, you know, now much more integrated setup, I used to have just a single PDF that had a bunch of intro essays that I'd previously done for the podcast. And I found it was kind of exhausting, although this is like such a baby first world thing to say. Even just to go find that PDF every time and put it into the web UI so Claude would have it to use as examples. And it's like, man, that's really not much to complain about. And yet somehow it feels so much better now that those sort of moving of files and context around have been mostly automated away. Just on the time though, I mean, okay, so I'm empathizing with some of these problems, some of these pain points for sure, but it still seems like there's something, I guess one of the hypotheses we should always keep in mind is people maybe just in many cases don't like their jobs that much. I think this is something that the AI discourse broadly should remember much more than it does. And I've probably got on my soapbox enough times about that already, but that's for sure an ingredient in this overall recipe. But it was just striking still that like, okay, 13 hours saved, a little under half of that sort of reconsumed by doing this copying and pasting and double checking sort of work. But that still gives you almost a full workday back, right? Am I reading that right? Are people like, have we created a four day work week that we're just not ready to talk about? So here's the problem, Nathan. And when we look at the individual level, we're seeing all of this exciting productivity gain. Even if we consider bot sitting, the net net is positive. The problem is, where is that time savings going is 1 aspect. And what we do see, especially in organizations that haven't communicated an AI strategy and employees aren't confident in their organization's AI strategy, employees are taking it for themselves, right? The amount of non-disclosure, the hiding of the AI usage to managers, it's rampant and we have some data points in the report. And so they're managing the perception. They're managing the perception of how they're using the technology because in many cases, you tell your manager or your organization you're getting 6 hours back, probably you're going to then get 6 hours more of work. And that is the wrong calculus. But I actually think the bigger problem is what happens at the individual level often does not translate to the team and organization. In the research, it's sometimes called coordination neglect, right? And I think the most concrete example of this is you can have me as an individual worker, I take a single bullet point, I convert it into a five page report, I send it to my colleague. A colleague takes that five-page report it's too long, turns it into a single bullet point, right? Each person looks productive each person looks like they've saved massive amounts of time, but when you... put the pieces together was just this hamster wheel of AI slop, work slop, lot ******** in a way that does very little service to the organization. And I think that's the disconnect here. It's very hard to measure, but it's certainly something we're seeing in practice in conversations with executives. And some of the data speaks to it certainly in terms of its individual productivity gains not translating to real team and organizational gains. Part of me feels like that might be healthy. It could be more healthy perhaps, but a four day work week would be a nice stepping stone perhaps on the road to the AI future.…

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