13 Recent Articles about How Companies are Using AI

/

Life is in the Digging

/

Two brothers decided to dig a deep hole behind their house. As they were working, a couple of older boys stopped by to watch.

"What are you doing?"  

"We plan to dig a hole all the way through the earth," one of the brothers volunteered excitedly.

The older boys began to laugh, telling the younger ones that digging a hole all the way through the earth was impossible.

After a long silence, one of the diggers picked up a jar full of spiders, worms, and a wide assortment of insects. He removed the lid and showed the wonderful contents to the scoffing visitors.

"Even if we don't dig all the way through the earth, look what we found along the way!"

Their goal was far too ambitious, but it did cause them to dig. And that is what a goal is for — to cause us to move in the direction we have chosen; in other words, to set us to digging!

Not every goal will be fully achieved. Not every job will end successfully. Not every relationship will endure. Not every hope will come to pass. Not every love will last. Not every endeavor will be completed. Not every dream will be realized. But when you fall short of your aim, you can say, "Yes, but look at what I found along the way! Look at the wonderful things that have come into my life because I tried to do something!"

It is in the digging that life is lived. And I believe it is joy in the journey, in the end, that truly matters.

A Dozen Things People are Trying to Get AI to Do

/

Irritation with Others Mistakes

/

The imperative person has very idealistic expectations. Only the best is acceptable. Frailties, common to our humaness, are despise. The result is a strong tendency to look up on anything less than ideal with disdain. That's why imperative people often admit, “I get irritated when other people make mistakes.” or “I tend to do an important job myself because someone might not do it right.” Or “I get impatient when other people can't understand what needs to be done.”

So, clutching onto our high ideals, we tend to hold ourselves above others. False superiority is felt. Condemnation is communicated.  Annoyance is a constant companion. Relationships suffer. (All the while), the impaired person must cling to correctness.

Les Carter, Imperative People: Those Who Must Be in Control

A Dozen Articles about Employees Using AI at Work   

/

Becoming Real

/

"Real isn't how you are made," said the Skin Horse. "It's a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real."

“Does it hurt?" asked the Rabbit.

"Sometimes," said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. "When you are Real you don't mind being hurt."

"Does it happen all at once, like being wound up," he asked, "or bit by bit?"

"It doesn't happen all at once," said the Skin Horse. "You become. It takes a long time. That's why it doesn't happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don't matter at all, because once you are Real you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand."

Margery Williams, The Velveteen Rabbit

Plagiarism & False Data in Academic Papers

/

There are countless credible accusations of (academic) misconduct that go uncorrected; I myself have published articles challenging the integrity of hundreds of papers. The majority of them have not been retracted, corrected or even remarked upon. I would wager that most reasonably large universities (my own included) have faculty members who are known to have plagiarized, fabricated, falsified, claimed undue credit, hidden financial conflicts of interest or misbehaved in numerous other ways and who have seemingly gone unpunished."

New York University professor Charles Seife writing in the New York Times

AI & Soft Skills

/

When it comes to using ChatGPT at work, some business leaders believe that soft skills will be crucial in the age of AI. Earlier this month, Aneesh Raman, a vice president at LinkedIn, said that communication, creativity, and flexibility are skills that will set employees apart in the workforce as opposed to technical skills like coding. Perhaps doubling down on what makes you human may be what saves you from being replaced by AI. -Aaron Mok

Something AI is good at—and something it's not

/

“Studies this year of ChatGPT in legal analysis and white-collar writing chores have found that the bot helps lower-performing people more than it does the most skilled. On a task that required reasoning based on evidence, however, ChatGPT was not helpful at all. Here, ChatGPT lulled employees into trusting it too much. Unaided humans had the correct answer 85 percent of the time. People who used ChatGPT without training scored just over 70 percent. Those who had been trained did even worse, getting the answer only 60 percent of the time. In interviews conducted after the experiment, “people told us they neglected to check because it’s so polished, it looks so right.’”

Read more in The New York Times

Turning happiness into a management tool

/

A large American health-care provider, Ochsner Health System, introduced a rule that workers must make eye contact and smile whenever they walk within ten feet of another person in the hospital. Pret A Manger sends in mystery shoppers to visit every outlet regularly to see if they are greeted with the requisite degree of joy. Pass the test and the entire staff gets a bonus—a powerful incentive for workers to turn themselves into happiness police. Companies have a right to ask their employees to be polite when they deal with members of the public. They do not have a right to try to regulate their workers’ psychological states and turn happiness into an instrument of corporate control.

Companies would be much better off forgetting wishy-washy goals like encouraging contentment. They should concentrate on eliminating specific annoyances, such as time-wasting meetings and pointless memos. Instead, they are likely to develop ever more sophisticated ways of measuring the emotional state of their employees. Academics are already busy creating smartphone apps that help people keep track of their moods, such as Track Your Happiness and Moodscope. It may not be long before human-resource departments start measuring workplace euphoria via apps, cameras and voice recorders.

Schumpeter in The Economist

Career Choices

/

Find what you are good at. Find what you have a passion for doing. People will pay you good money to do the things that fit within both circles. No one will be willing to pay for your "C minus" work (or not very much). So forget about bringing your "fours" up to "sixes" (on a scale of one to ten). Focus on getting your "eights "up to "nines" and your "nines" up to "tens." (A bit of an oversimplification but you get the idea).

Stephen Goforth

A Human/AI Blend isn't Always The Best Option

/

A new study “recruited management consultants from Boston Consulting Group.” One of the tasks was to brainstorm about a new type of shoe, sketch a persuasive business plan for making it and write about it persuasively. Some researchers had believed only humans could perform such creative tasks. They were wrong. The consultants who used ChatGPT produced work that independent evaluators rated about 40 percent better on average. In fact, people who simply cut and pasted ChatGPT’s output were rated more highly than colleagues who blended its work with their own thoughts. And the A.I.-assisted consultants were more than 20 percent faster.

Read more in The New York Times