This book review was written by Eugene Kernes
“The arrival of generative Artificial Intelligence promised to free us from tedious tasks, give us more free time, and boost our creativity. Yet, for most of us, it has done the exact opposite. It has raised productivity expectations to new heights, flooded our communication channels with an unmanageable volume of information, and turned our attention into the most coveted and exploited resource on the planet.” – Francesc Grau, Introduction, Page 4
“There’s also the trap of activity metrics. Many companies measure employee productivity by tracking activity: number of emails sent, messages replied to, hours logged into the system, documents produced. These metrics are easy to count, but they measure activity, not impact. An employee who spends their day replying to emails and generating AI-driven documents might rack up sky-high activity stats while contributing no real value to the organization.” – Francesc Grau, Chapter 1: The Myth of infinite Productivity, Page 11
“If you stop walking and rely on a wheelchair every day,
your leg muscles will weaken. It’s a basic biological rule: use it or lose it.
The same goes for our cognitive abilities. As we delegate more and more
thinking tasks to artificial intelligence—from writing emails to summarizing
books or making strategic decisions—we risk letting our own mental
"muscles" atrophy.” – Francesc Grau, Chapter 5: The Erosion of Human
Agency, Page 39
Excerpts provided with permission of the author
Is This An Overview?
As more and more thinking becomes delegated to search
engines, to artificial intelligence, people have risked their own capacity to
think. By outsourcing thinking, people
do not develop their own views, ideas, and critical analysis skills.
When systems become more efficient, there are claims that
people would need to work less. In
practice, efficiency causes people to work more. People start to take on more responsibility. Rather than reduce the workload, efficiency
broadens what is achievable. Artificial
intelligence had the same efficiency claim, as artificial intelligence was
meant to provide people with more free time.
But what happened was the creation of a flood of information that
demands attention. A lot more content
that needs to be supervised, to be edited.
Artificial intelligence has enabled employees to reply to more emails,
generate more documents, but that content is often useless. Producing more useless content does not
contribute value to the organization, while wasting organizational resources.
People have limited mental bandwidth, the ability to process
information. The increased amount of
information, the continuous stream of content, along with the culture of being
always available, has taxed the mental bandwidth enough to cause mental health
problems. As the mental bandwidth has
been overloaded, people have lost the ability to concentrate which reduced the
quality of decision making and cost creative risk taking. The brain needs time to recover, to restore
cognitive ability, but there is no longer time to recover. The Cognitive Resistance System are practical
ways to regain the ability to think.
Caveats?
Even for a short book, the people who are most in need of
the advice, might be the least capable of considering the advice. Thinking about how to recover is limited for
those whose concentration was harmed by overloading their mental
bandwidth.
