AI optimism

As I have alluded to before, I am an AI optimist, but not for the reasons that you might think. My optimism is that AI will make technology-mediated human interactions so bad that this will force a breakthrough to a better level of human to human interaction. Actually, maybe less of a breaking through as a returning to a quality of interaction that we've been collectively chipping away at for the last 20 to 30 years.

Take performance reviews, which are already ridiculously performative. The layering on of AI is making these so much worse. What was a 1.5/2 page report of cut and pasted paragraphs from other reviews, is becoming 5 pages, as supervisors use AI to help them write an even more "complete" review based on all sorts of data scraped from emails, meeting ootes, etc. Smart employees will then use AI to help them distil these 5 page reports back down to what is actually important and meaningfull.

At some point we'll realize that this is all just AI bots talking to each other and hopefully change the process completely to go back to a time when supervisors actually cared about their employees and expressed that care by giving them honest, in person, straightforward feedback.