[adampunk]

> The logical implication of this is that AI’s overall impact on the workforce is really going to come down to the composition of fake work vs. real work that already existed.

Setting aside a critical and ironic problem, I think this is very sharp and worth keeping in mind. It’s testable, logical, and not really bound to whatever the ragged frontier happens to be.

The problem is how do we find a good proxy for this?!

[rxm233]

It’s hard to evaluate or even define “fake” work from any kind of data-driven perspective since you can always take the stance that it accomplishes some unobservable goal and is therefore done for a good reason. I think a lot of people don’t believe it exists for this reason, but as basically anyone that’s worked a corporate middle manager job knows, it definitely does it exist.

[adampunk]

Exactly. Sorry I didn't reply to this earlier, because it's dead on. there's an old paper from a professor that Harvard gave tenure to before realizing that he was an actual communist lmao titled "What do bosses do?" (https://elearning.unite.it/pluginfile.php/356459/mod_resourc...) Spoiler: not much.

There's lots of real invisible work that isn't measured for actual good reasons. But 100-1000x that work is just bullshit and is distributed throughout middle management. I think you're right. I think AI is gonna pull that out in weird ways, exposing it in one place, amplifying it in another.