Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins/Futurism. Source: Getty Images
Bosses being completely disconnected from the needs of their employees is a story as old as time. But it definitely feels like the AI craze has led them to lock themselves away in high ivory towers, as employees are told that the technology is going to make their jobs easier, while also being used to replace them.
Now a new survey highlighted by wall street journal This reflects the growing technological divide between grunts and executives.
After questioning 5,000 white-collar workers, consulting firm Section found that 40 percent of those not in management roles said AI does not save them any time during the entire week. And only two percent said AI saves more than 12 hours of their time.
Contrast this with the reactions of executives, very few of whom have been disillusioned with AI. Only two percent said AI does not save their time, while 19 percent said it saves more than 12 hours per week.
“Executives automatically assume that AI is going to be the savior,” explains user experience designer Steve McGarvey. WSJ.
He incorporated his personal experience with large language models into his work, which focuses on making websites accessible to visually impaired visitors.
“I can’t count the number of times I’ve been looking for a solution to a problem, asked an LLM, and had someone give me a solution to an accessibility issue that was completely wrong,” McGarvey said.
More attention has been paid to companies that use AI to justify brutal layoffs. But employees who retain their jobs are forced to use new and still experimental AI tools that may not be useful at all for their specific roles, and any complaints they make fall on deaf ears.
The campaign for the technology is largely led by the world’s largest companies. For example, Nvidia head Jensen Huang reportedly told his employees that they would be “crazy” if they did not use AI to perform virtually “every task” after he learned that some of his managers had suggested that employees use it less. Meanwhile, the bosses of Microsoft and Google have claimed that a large part of their companies’ code is written with AI.
The section survey also found that there is considerable uneasiness about AI among the rank and file. Nearly two-thirds of regular employees said they felt worried or overwhelmed about AI, while less than half of managers felt the same. Once again in sharp contrast to their subordinates, about 75 percent of executives said they were excited about the technology.
The jury is still out on whether AI actually increases productivity. But a growing body of research is suggesting that it’s not the efficiency miracle that CEOs make it out to be. covered extensively mit study It was found that 95 percent of companies that adopted AI did not see any meaningful increase in revenue. Perhaps this is because AI agents overwhelmingly fail to complete common remote work and office tasks, as other studies have found, or because AI coding assistants actually slow down the programmers who use them, as another study has found.
Part of the problem is that it’s not clear what AI is most useful for. User Experience Engineer Dan Hiester explained WSJ He used AI to help with a coding task that should have only taken half an hour, which took his entire afternoon, while another task that was expected to take him several days, took only 20 minutes with AI.
“It’s completely reset my understanding of estimating the time it takes to do something,” he said. WSJ.
Of course, this is probably why CEOs think AI is saving them so much time and their employees aren’t, because their jobs, compared to others, can be more easily replaced with it.
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