AI and knowledge work

Notes

One of the fundamental problems

“What you write down doesn’t mean exactly what you think it means. And when it does, it doesn’t have the consequences you expected.” —Software Abstractions: Logic, Language, and Analysis

Thinking about ways to increase competency or productivity

Instead of trying to find what humans can do better than AI, find ways to leverage AI to increase productivity.

The argument that there is something that humans are good at but AI is bad at was a futile idea even in the 1950s (e.g., see the various arguments introduced in Computing machinery and intelligence and Alan Turing’s rebuttals). Rather than looking for such things, it seems better to think about ways to increase the performance of a system composed of AI and humans or how to utilize the value created by AI. For the time being, ‘replacement of human resources by AI’ will likely involve more cases where humans who use AI well replace humans who use AI poorly, rather than cases where AI directly replaces humans.

Using GenAI as a learning tool, not a crutch - Stack Overflow

Concerns about value unrelated to competency or production

Knowledge activities separated from production also have value.

Even if machines are faster than humans, sports (100m running) are still meaningful. Even after AlphaGo, humans still compete at Go. Even if AI is smarter than humans, some intellectual activities may continue to have meaning in a form separate from the labor for production. art, etc. Benjamin claims the loss of ‘aura’ in The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, but many works have a larger aura due to reproduction (people still go to the Louvre to see Mona Lisa), and ‘reproduction’ is meaningless for much conceptual art.
The problem Alienated labor mentioned by Karl Marx can be alleviated. Of course, for that to happen, implementing Distributive justice is a very important task.

Flexibility, generalist, optionality

2025-03-28 - The Return of the UX Generalist
2025-03-11 - Organization structures in the age of A.I. agents will be fluid, not fixed.
Optionality: How to Survive and Thrive in a Volatile World

Different lenses of thinking

Why? To instruct AI, and for my own use.

Douglas Walton - Argumentation schemes for presumptive reasoning
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Ethics

ToDo