Mastodawn

Paul Cantrell May 22, 2024

Less about tools that boost productivity, more about tools that reduce total workload.

Paul Cantrell May 22, 2024

Specific line of thought to illustrate my general point:

Consider an LLM that helps manage email correspondence. It writes emails! It summarizes emails! Less reading! Less typing! More messages faster! Productivity boost!! Except:

- You have to babysit the LLM, guide it and check it to make sure it’s accurately preserving human intent (which is, after all, the whole point of communication…right??). That’s new work, and likely cancels out the slim time savings of reduced reading and typing.

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🔏 Matthias Wiesmann

@inthehands The problem is you assume that the goal of e-mails is communicating information. Often the goal is social, i.e. show you care/you work/you respect the social codes/you are productive.
LLM are "good" because they are machines that handle social problems, you can type ”tell this moron project fnuble is delayed because upstairs fired Bob”, LLM translates into 5 paragraphs of corp-speak, sends e-mail, on the other end, LLM translates back into “fnuble project late, Bob was fired”.