OOO: The metastasis of productivity in an AI-driven world

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If you dread your regular productivity results at work, congratulations — you’re part of the majority in the corporate ecosystem. You don’t meet your quota and you’re in the red. You meet it too soon and, well, you’ve screwed up the flow for your future self (not to mention your colleagues).

What if, in an alternate universe, the productivity matrix is reversed? Like a doctor’s appointment after five years in remission, in which they tell you, “I’m sorry to say, but your productivity has metastasized. You aren’t taking care of your loved ones enough. You haven’t checked on your health in more than a year. Your workplace expectations are growing much too fast.” 🤯

Cue the record scratch and we’re back in our current universe, where AI promises productivity gains out the wazoo and enough is never quite enough because the goalpost is always on the move. All the while, many caregivers are forced to reduce their hours or quit their jobs outright to manage the needs of loved ones. And there are people with disabilities who are unable to reach the full-time threshold to get quality benefits that are brutally tied to a job just out of reach.

In the cultural crystal ball that looks into the future of work, AI’s increasingly integral role in the workplace is inevitable. Generative AI has the potential to automate nearly a third of hours worked in the U.S. Still, the question remains: What will organizational leaders do with that spare time? Continue to grow in the vein of Boeing during its glory days to support dystopian lifestyle enhancements for top-tier leaders, or fill the gaps in equity throughout the workforce to mitigate the effects of oppression?

“When we're thinking about workplace culture and racism,” said Dr. Akilah Cadet, CEO of Change Cadet and author of White Supremacy is All Around: Notes From a Black Disabled Woman in a White World, “we're talking about how people can be in places and spaces of belonging and minimizing opportunities of othering. That means a heterosexual, cisgender, white guy feels as welcome as the black, disabled woman.”

When you have that point of belonging, those individuals are able to contribute more to the overall work towards the company’s goals and metrics, Cadet said. When that doesn't happen, othering — a strong verb — persists and, in many cases, exacerbates. DEI (or any of the other acronym-friendly efforts) are active pursuits, one that AI could potentially promote if given the opportunity. However, the technology’s potential could easily swing in the other direction, increasing individual expectations and making working conditions more strenuous. 

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In an ideal world, AI takes over tasks that a human doesn’t want to do, and the worker is not giving away their agency in the process. For oppressed individuals, this is not an ideal world. The labor of the general workforce fuels the income of corporations, executives and stockholders. However, AI technologist Susannah Shattuck, head of product at responsible AI governance platform Credo AI and former leader at IBM Watson, said the real value of AI unlocks when it enables us to do things humans can’t do yet.

“I do also think that just like any other technology, you're trading one set of problems for another,” Shattuck said. “The risk of these systems outputting misinformation or outputting biased content is quite high.”

Bias is both a human concept and a deeply mathematical one, but the two are not mutually exclusive. “There are some really important steps that technologists and organizations need to be taking to make sure that the development of AI continues in an inclusive way, in order to prevent some dystopian future where AI systems are simply perpetuating these power structures that exist,” said Shattuck. 

Like, for example, asking from the very beginning of any AI implementation, who is impacted by this? “If you don’t ask those questions then, by default, you end up building a biased system,” she added.

On the output side, humans will need to remain in the driver’s seat, in charge — at the very least — of reviewing what AI comes up with before propelling it out into the capitalistic atmosphere. Leaders tout generative AI’s potential to take on the burden of tediousness, leaving humans the space to be creative as their foremost pursuit. However, creativity as a constant behaves as a cognitive burden.

A scientific meta-analysis found that frequent breaks reduce mental fatigue and increase willingness to push on when work becomes hard, particularly for tasks requiring creativity. In other words, a greater human emphasis on problem-solving and creative work, while an AI agent operates on tedium in the background, could make the existing standard of full-time work feel even more excessive than it already does. 

Workers are feeling the weight of swelling demands on their productivity, with a third of full-time employees saying they will likely quit their jobs in the next six months as a result of burnout, according to The Upwork Research Institute. The research says burnout is worse among women (with 74% feeling burnt out) than men (68%). While gender is just one plane of marginalization, this data emphasizes where the burden tends to lean in the standard work environment. As you delve deeper into factors that contribute to workplace and societal othering, like race and ability, this tilt is likely only to worsen.

Fortunately, Shattuck said, the majority of the responsible AI community is made up of people who understand oppression to some extent. The same, however, cannot be said for the AI development community at large. OpenAI’s Sam Altman could be considered an avatar of this realm, which author Emily Chang refers to as “brotopia.”

“By lionizing the idea of meritocracy, Silicon Valley can deny that the lack of diversity is a problem,” Chang wrote in her 2019 book “Brotopia: Breaking Up the Boys’ Club of Silicon Valley.”

“There's nothing wrong with technology,” Cadet emphasized. “That's the beauty of this world, where we can continually innovate — but what can be done to bring people along the way so it's not an afterthought?”

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In the fantastical potential future of artificial general intelligence, which goes further than AI by achieving “the ability to understand or learn any intellectual task that a human being can,” according to Google Cloud, work itself will encounter a reckoning regardless of level or industry. Under any technological shift so far — like word processors, internet and automation — “the nature of the work changes,” said Karen Panetta, IEEE fellow and dean of graduate education at Tufts School of Engineering. However, AGI could make the transition feel like a blunt force. 

Already, the discussion of universal basic income has become more of a necessity under the forecast of AGI. The Stanford Basic Income Lab defines UBI as “a regular cash payment to all members of a community, without a work requirement or other conditions.” Even before AI, wealth inequalities were apparent, but they’re only growing. In 1983, white families had $320,000 more wealth than Black and Hispanic families, or an average of about four times the wealth. In 2022, white families had $1 million more, or an average wealth six times higher. If AI shakes up the nature of work at devastating magnitude, rather than a more seamless transition like we’ve seen in the past, the ever-increasing cost of living may be a moot point without income to spend.

For today’s generative AI, Panetta touts the benefits for defensive cybersecurity to protect the infrastructures we rely on and access to education that can mitigate gaps in equity down the line, among other benefits. “The downside is people are in such a rush to use it that they don't really come up with a robust strategy to engage,” Panetta said, which could simply cause the projects to fail, but also make the risks — like bias — more likely to occur.

Just because workplace demands are up doesn’t mean the demands outside of work are going down. Take caregivers as an example. In a 2023 report, 13% of mostly unpaid caregivers had to quit their job to focus on caregiving, and nearly a quarter (24%) cut their work hours. As a result, nearly half (47%) said caregiving is a financial burden. “Nearly 50% of expectant mothers do not return to their employer after childbirth,” Vanessa Jupe, CEO of Leva, a platform helping companies support new parents, said at a SHRM Conference. “This costs employers one to two times the salary for each non-returning employee, impacting productivity and morale.” 

While much of the caregiving burden impacting ability to work has to do with a downright shortage of professional caregivers, a lot of it also involves the unattainable expectations of full-time work, which AI could mitigate if used for equitable purposes. 

This is all, of course, assuming AI actually delivers on its promise of productivity improvements. In 1987, American economist Robert Solow said while receiving his Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences, “You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics.” Later, academic researcher Erik Brynjolfsson, now a Senior Fellow at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI, coined this notion the “productivity paradox.” The idea, that higher information technology investments often negatively impacts worker productivity, could be a topic of conversation in the generative AI era, too.

Upwork’s research says 96% of C-suite executives expect AI to boost productivity, but 77% of employees using AI say it has actually added to their workload.

Then there’s the disparity of what productivity actually means between leaders and employees. The Institute for Corporate Productivity (i4cp) found that 87% of employees at so-called high-performance organizations report they are productive at work, but just 12% of leaders say they feel confident their team is productive. If leaders, who Cadet said “carry the attitudes, behaviors, thoughts and beliefs that all employees have to have, regardless of if they know it or not,” view productivity more critically (or perhaps are unaware of the full scope of their team’s work), it makes sense that the goalpost is consistently moving — and that AI would only exacerbate the issue.

Madeline Borkin, vice president of member development and executive sponsor of the chief diversity officer board for i4cp, recognizes the asset generative AI can be for people with disabilities and differences of all kinds. 

However, at this point, Borkin said, “LinkedIn has more information about an employee than a company does. It should be the other way around.” The problem with this is if companies have a clear line of sight to what their employees can offer, they can make more appropriate investments in formal upskilling initiatives, tuition payment and apprenticeship programs, all of which can help close wage and wealth disparities and increase access to benefits for traditionally underrepresented groups.

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AI is not new, but generative AI is still young, and the access that the general public has to AI technology is too. “Previously, the primary interface was code, or numeric data, Excel spreadsheets,” said Credo AI’s Shattuck. “And now the primary interface is text. It's language.” Quite literally, AI is speaking to people in a way it has never done before. 

Concurrently, the U.S. — and perhaps the world — is experiencing an ongoing crisis that has yet to see its denouement. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy’s 2021 advisory on youth mental health shows the young people who give future-reliant hope to a society are in the throes of anxiety, addiction and crime. Young people who eventually enter the workforce face risk of burnout, which has been shown to adversely affect the physical and mental health of workers. 

Society-induced marginalization comes in many forms, and the current notion of productivity may not be sustainable. If AI were to be put to use equitably, it would ease the threshold of what it means to be productive, not maintain — or worsen — it. 

But the growth mindset of Corporate Earth may be indelible, with AI just an enabling mechanism. As James Baldwin wrote in “Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone” (1968), “A child’s major attention has to be concentrated on how to fit into a world which, with every passing hour, reveals itself as merciless.”

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