Re-Thinking Productivity
As a Black, neurodivergent woman I have find it easy to question and operate outside of traditional systems. Because most of the systems I grew up in weren’t designed with my thriving in mind.
Stay with me, I promise this becomes relevant to you very quickly. Because I so often operated outside of systems, like capitalism for example, I found myself questioning them long before advances like Large Language Models (aka AI) made clear the ways in which some systems have failed people.
To be honest, I don’t really care about AI taking jobs. I care about how the growing adoption of AI will affect what it means to be productive in contemporary workplaces. Places like Amazon have shown that organizations are as likely to fire and rehire a whole team due to AI as the wind is to blow.
Because AI isn’t the real problem, productivity is.
As the co-founder of an organization that focuses on re-imagining work, I wonder more about how people will be equipped to respond if or when AI is able to do all or elements of their jobs effectively. It has already begun. AI is actively changing the way companies think about and measure productivity.
Yes, AI is going to take some of our jobs. It will also fundamentally change others. It’s hard, if not impossible, to predict the speed of adoption, but engineers have already written the code that enabled LLMs to do the work they used to do. So how do people, employees, and workers respond? That’s what I care about.
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In economic terms, productivity is a measure of economic performance. It compares the amount of goods and services produced (output) with the amount of inputs used to produce those goods and services.
Sociologically, the concept of productivity has become the false belief that our value as members of society—as human beings—is tied to our outputs. We’ve been educated and conditioned to believe in productivity as a moral good. We’ve been taught rote memorization and obedience toward authority to make us better producers of economic output in an industrial economy. Engineers, lawyers, doctors, baristas, teachers, account managers; we are all both the producers and the consumers. But the conditions of work have shifted over the past few decades so that most of us are too exhausted to do more than produce and consume, without being able to pause and consider whether this is the life we want to be living.
So, as we watch the impacts of late-stage capitalism consume the planet and our humanity, I want to posit an idea for you to consider: productivity, as we know it, is a scam. The unachievable hamster wheel of exponential year-over-year growth expectations created by capitalist ideology benefits the very few and negatively impacts the rest of us.
For most of its existence, the concept of productivity has been grounded in exploitation. A few generations ago, productivity was the factory worker who did the same monotonous job for the entirety of their working life. When those jobs were replaced by robots, it evolved into how much time in a 24-hour period can be squeezed out of a white-collar worker. But in the 1970s, something key happened that has led us to where we are today in many ways.
Milton Friedman untethered most companies from the moral yoke of caring about employees and even customers with an opinion essay in the New York Times that reshaped the world of work. It was titled “The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase Its Profits.” CEOs became beholden not to people (customers or employees), but to the bottom line and shareholders. Their job became to extract as much output from their labour force at the lowest cost, leaving many essential roles in society like nursing, teaching, and junior account management overworked and underpaid.
And yet we, as workers, continue to worship at the altar of productivity. Telling ourselves that the only way to succeed is to be more productive. To work harder.
We use productivity as a measure of the value and worth of an individual, to the point that if a person isn’t able to be productive, they are seen as less than and often feel less than themselves. Think of people experiencing homelessness or living with a disability. The ideology of productivity is so embedded in our culture that rather than help them, we, as a society, view them as a burden. Instead of as people it is our collective duty to support as it has been done in more “traditional” societies for generations. We shame poverty and slowing down as laziness, clinging to a Protestant work ethic that has failed most of us and enriched a lucky few. Because in western culture being a good person is equated with being a productive person.
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The lie of productivity as the only measure of individual value has also led to thinking the bottom lines of corporations are more important than our own wellbeing and humanity. And to our lawmakers making laws that enforce that false belief. Because ultimately, productivity (and the constant search for it) is inhumane. It leaves us sacrificing our wellbeing, our health, and the health of the planet for 50+ hour work weeks. Think of how common it is for CEOs to die of heart attacks. Or the unpaid intern who works late nights and early mornings with the promise of maybe a position that pays them $45K a year at the end of it if they’re lucky (that is not a living wage in many parts of North America).
That lie promised boomers a comfortable retirement, the accolades of leadership to Gen X, and Millennials new experiences. Gen Z has been made no promises because it’s impossible not to see the systemic failures that have left them with little to aim for. Which may be why they’ve become better than the rest of us about setting boundaries between work and life.
But the worst lie that productivity has taught us is that we are replaceable. That we are lucky to have a job in “this” economy, whether it is booming or on a downward spiral, or being impacted by unpredictable rulers and AI. At Re-Work, an organization I co-founded to help ambitious professionals re-imagine work, one of the first and most important lessons we teach is that you bring value simply for existing. You bring your unique lived experience, your education, your perspective, and your expertise to your employers. And employers are lucky to have you, not the other way around. Work is a social contract which is easy to forget in the constant pursuit of productivity. The contract is simple: employees exchange their time, a set amount of it, for pay. Some jobs come with prestige and perks and bonuses and social capital, but ultimately the exchange is the same. Time out of your life in exchange for the means to survive (money). But this is a lesson that takes time to internalize.
We are educated and conditioned to productivity but are facing a real revolution in work when it comes to how productivity is achieved. CEOs and executives will talk about human resource savings as AI becomes more capable of taking on certain tasks. Not enough people, including those in government, are wondering about the long-term social impacts of this revolution. Of having people conditioned for productivity but not needed for it in the same ways. The Internet was originally a very disruptive technology with similar existential issues, but it exists widely today because of heavy investment from the government. But also born of antitrust cases that forced Microsoft to share its APIs. The types of checks on power that just don’t exist today as tech CEOs spend millions to combat legislative efforts to protect…people. A few days ago, Claude’s AI support agent told me that I couldn’t be refunded for extra usage I’d been charged for but never received, citing terms of service and noting it wasn’t illegal (but then quickly erasing that part of the chat). Because there’s no current law in place to enforce…basic commerce within the LLM context.
The other very real problem that complicates this moment is that most people are living in a state of precarity. Limited savings, declining underfunded healthcare systems, increased cost of living, and an almost non-existent middle class make modern life feel uncertain for most people whether you’re a gas station attendant or a senior manager for marketing. So, the threat of large language models in the workforce looms large when we know CEOs don’t care about us, much less our rent or mortgage payments.
It’s no wonder that the looming evolutionary threat of AI feels so scary for many modern workers. Some part of them understands the existential threat of a technology that can be exponentially productive, but also they’re one missed paycheque away from what so much of our society deplores: poverty.
So, what do we do when the means and mechanisms of productivity are something we can give to an increasingly capable LLM? When the thing we’ve been told our whole existence is the key to our worth and value is suddenly able to be done by computers. What does it mean for a sense of self-worth and value if productivity is taken out of our hands and turned into digital output?
It would be wonderful and naïve to imagine that the AI Revolution will bring about a universal basic income and the ability to pursue meaning beyond productivity. But in cultures conditioned to it, and to the belief that work is next to godliness, it’s hard to imagine that happening without some effort. Without fundamental shifts in what it means to live and exist in a post-LLM future of work.
If we lived in, quite frankly, a better society, it might be an opportunity to engage with new ways of working and thinking. But that’s not what we’re set up for. Not yet.
Which is why it feels ever more urgent for us to re-imagine what work is and can be for human beings in the context of technological revolution. Redefining what it means to be productive. We’ve trained our brains for productivity but that is not a skill that will get us ahead in a future of work that includes AI, a tool that ultimately takes on the task of infinite productivity.
What is left (we think) is our humanity. As well as care and creative work, the jobs AI can’t do. What’s left is our ability to imagine into the future and judge and create and discern. To have taste. It is natural to us but has been “educated” and conditioned out of us. We long ago stopped encouraging children to think outside the box and we never encouraged them to challenge authority or the status quo. And yet that is the superpower that will move us forward in a way that doesn’t just continue to enrich those already rich but also lift up those who have fallen or will fall out of the middle class and those who have always needed help.
Software engineer and blogger Steve Yegge acknowledges that we can’t slow down AI but we can control the culture since we are the culture in his essay about the dynamic of work and AI titled, “The AI Vampire.” He reminds readers that the ability to 10x productivity via AI is also mentally and physically draining and no one benefits from that approach. He also makes a key point: “…collectively, the employees of your company have literally all the power.”
In his piece he talks about the ways in which working alongside AI produces more for companies but at an extreme human cost. He also posits one solution: “what if people just didn’t have to work so many hours?” encouraging leaders to change their expectations about how many hours there are in a human workday. Because with agentic tools eight human hours are no longer needed. Though he doesn’t talk about pay, the assumption and hope would be that pay would remain the same in this scenario.
It should have been done long ago. And louder voices should have countered Milton Friedman. So that work didn’t become an effort in exploitation in pursuit of the bottom line. But this is a moment. An opportunity to think in entirely new ways about work, productivity, and the human experience. To make work better. But where do we start (yes we, not you—this is not a one-person job)?
It starts with actual government engagement and policy on the issue. AI is well into its first decade of existence and adoption on a mass scale, yet there is currently no binding policy governing its development and operation in Canada and most other places. Which means we are far from a place of protective and responsive policy to help our economy and workers adapt to the change it’ll bring. Remember what happened with social media legislation? Let’s not let that happen again.
That means demanding more from legislators. Evan Solomon, the Minister of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Innovation in Canada, has yet to table any meaningful legislation on this topic.
Workers have power when they are…well…working together to decide what true value is and how much of themselves and their outputs they need to give away in the context of AI.
We need a work revolution that re-centers people and our humanity. But we also need to do the work of tapping into what makes us unique. To understand that the best ways of working allow for our most creative and interesting outputs. Outputs that, yes, benefit the bottom line, but also our own humanity and wellbeing. We can imagine and create a different world of work. One that takes productivity out of the equation and introduces human flourishing. An approach that begins to, for once and finally, benefit the many and not just the few.
Ultimately, what we can do is imagine into what’s never been. To ask the question: what if something different were true? And begin to make it so.
