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Are We Getting Worse At Doing Work? · Humanity Working

• 0:05
  SPEAKER_00: All right, Paul.
• 0:06
  SPEAKER_00: I saw this MIT lab study, Your Brain on Chat GPT, and it found the lowest brain engagement and lingering performance drops in the group that relied on ChatGPT.
• 0:17
  SPEAKER_00: Did you see that one?
• 0:18
  SPEAKER_01: I did.
• 0:19
  SPEAKER_01: Hey Matt.
• 0:20
  SPEAKER_01: Umdy.
• 0:22
  SPEAKER_01: Uh it's it's a really, really, really interesting study.
• 0:28
  SPEAKER_01: And I suspect that if the world of AI goes in the direction that it looks like AI is going, we will either be talking and citing this study as a canary in a coal mine, or we'll be looking at it as a pile of as a pile of crap and an outlier and a terribly run study or something along those lines.
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_01: But something, this will be uh, this I think will probably be a topic of of conversation for years to come.
• 0:59
  SPEAKER_01: It was um an MIT Media Lab study.
• 1:02
  SPEAKER_01: It was called Your Brain on Chat GPT.
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_01: It was shared around some uh some of the socials so people might see it.
• 1:08
  SPEAKER_01: I'll see if we can put a uh link to the uh to the study itself in uh um in the show notes.
• 1:15
  SPEAKER_01: And I would I'd recomm I'd recommend if you can, um, we'll include that link, look at the study itself, because some of the reporting on the study has been a little bit um uh a little bit overblown, and some of the reports on the studies uh uh have been a little bit inaccurate, as often is the uh often is the case.
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_01: Um but um very briefly, uh small group, 54 participants, which is which is considered small for any of these types of studies, um split into uh a three into groups, right?
• 1:51
  SPEAKER_01: So now we're getting even smaller, smaller numbers when you think about it as well.
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_01: Um but the groups were um first group was using large language model type stuff, generative AI.
• 2:02
  SPEAKER_01: Uh second were using search, and the third group were not using tools.
• 2:09
  SPEAKER_01: Um and basically um it was looking at not just how they um in engaged with it and what they did, but also looking um at what the impact was um on how their brains were functioning and how the brains were firing.
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_01: And um so this the results of this showed that the people that were using GPD had the what's known as the weakest neural connectivity, which in lay terms basically means that their brain was the least active.
• 2:43
  SPEAKER_01: Um and so this is concerning, right?
• 2:46
  SPEAKER_01: Because as we all know, uh part of what keeps our brains healthy is using our brains.
• 2:51
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah.
• 2:52
  SPEAKER_01: Um and uh um and using our brains and challenging our uh our brains to remain healthy.
• 2:58
  SPEAKER_01: So this is one of the reasons why um it created as much attention as it is.
• 3:03
  SPEAKER_01: And and you saw a lot of the reports were centered around, you know, is GPT making us stupid?
• 3:10
  SPEAKER_01: Right, where a lot were a lot of the reports associated with it.
• 3:13
  SPEAKER_01: And there's some evidence that it might be something worth looking at there.
• 3:16
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I mean, there's there's is there a bigger story here beyond AI?
• 3:21
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I I think there is.
• 3:23
  SPEAKER_01: Um and I've been spending some time thinking about it and taking a larger, kind of more historical view of this, right?
• 3:32
  SPEAKER_01: If you go back, you know, 100 years, um, the vast majority of people were not doing work that was intellectually demanding in any way.
• 3:43
  SPEAKER_01: Um and we were doing work that was helping the economy, we were doing work that was helping us, you know, pay our bills and things like that.
• 3:50
  SPEAKER_01: But if we wanted to exercise our brains, we had to, you know, pick up a book and and and start reading it.
• 3:56
  SPEAKER_01: So the um that has changed.
• 3:59
  SPEAKER_01: It changed, you know, relatively uh briefly, whereby there was there were opportunities to exercise your brains in all kinds of ways in the workplace.
• 4:08
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but now with the advent of these types of tools, um, not just GPT, but other tools that are uh sort of issued as productivity tools, we might be kind of like flipping that pendulum back a little bit, or at least we will be if we're not using them in uh in really interesting ways and consciously uh providing value add on top.
• 4:29
  SPEAKER_01: So I do.
• 4:30
  SPEAKER_01: I think there's a the the story here is um don't assume that your brain is going to be exercised naturally by what you do.
• 4:42
  SPEAKER_01: Um think about how you can keep your brain active in a whole in a whole bunch of different ways.
• 4:47
  SPEAKER_01: Um I have Bobby Hansen talking on the podcast a few weeks ago.
• 4:51
  SPEAKER_01: He talked about games like video games and how helpful actually they can be they can be in that regard.
• 4:56
  SPEAKER_01: But there are things we need to do anyway, just to make sure that our brains are being kept active.
• 5:00
  SPEAKER_00: It's like working out, but for your brain, you know, you gotta keep keep going, right?
• 5:04
  SPEAKER_00: So you're like building that brain skill muscle basically in in your brain.
• 5:10
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah.
• 5:11
  SPEAKER_00: What's like what would be a good example do you think work or real life um for those skills um in this context, you know?
• 5:22
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, you mean so like what a good example of what a skill muscle kind of is?
• 5:29
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah.
• 5:29
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 5:30
  SPEAKER_01: Um so well, first off, the the that that muscle is it is the is the key turn, right?
• 5:38
  SPEAKER_01: So what we have figured out um over gosh, the last four or five years of our work is that that analogy of these intangible things that we do at work, the things that kind of keep our brains active and so on, the best analogy is a muscle.
• 5:55
  SPEAKER_01: And the reason why it's such a good analogy is because it functions in very much like a muscle.
• 6:01
  SPEAKER_01: If you use it, it gets stronger.
• 6:03
  SPEAKER_01: If you don't use it, it gets weaker.
• 6:05
  SPEAKER_01: And I want people to really internalize that because if you think about the work that you do on a day-to-day basis, it may or may not um access that that or access those those skills.
• 6:23
  SPEAKER_01: And some of those skills will be accessed more or exercised more if you do one kind of work and exercise less if you do another, if you do another kind of work.
• 6:33
  SPEAKER_01: Um, the outside of work example that I often use uh is if you've got an elderly elderly relative and they live alone and you go visit them and you're spending any good period of time with them, you will quickly notice that their ability to do like interpersonal communication, perhaps their ability to be able to pick up subtle signs, their emotional intelligence, um, their EQ, if you like, yeah, kind of drifts a little bit.
• 7:01
  SPEAKER_01: Why?
• 7:01
  SPEAKER_01: Because they spend so much time living in their own shell.
• 7:04
  SPEAKER_01: They talk, they talk to anybody, they're talking to themselves.
• 7:07
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 7:08
  SPEAKER_01: So that's an example of a muscle degrading because we're not using that uh that muscle frequently.
• 7:14
  SPEAKER_01: So um whenever you are doing any sort of work, don't just think about what the work is, but think about how you're doing that work and how that equates to these various muscles and whether those muscles are being built or not being built.
• 7:29
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 7:30
  SPEAKER_00: I wonder how much of the of the atrophy of that social engagement that we that we experience through the the pandemic is back.
• 7:40
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 7:41
  SPEAKER_00: You know, like that.
• 7:42
  SPEAKER_01: Um, that's a very interesting thing.
• 7:44
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I I love that as a question, right?
• 7:47
  SPEAKER_01: Because um there's multiple things at uh at work here, right?
• 7:52
  SPEAKER_01: So, first off, um we are spending um less time now than we were before the pandemic in physical rooms with other people.
• 8:03
  SPEAKER_01: That is still the case, regardless of you know, back to office initiatives and so on.
• 8:07
  SPEAKER_01: Bunch of people came back to the office, everything's kind of stabilized now.
• 8:10
  SPEAKER_01: So you're not seeing hearing a lot about either return to office or remote hybrid workers.
• 8:16
  SPEAKER_01: Why?
• 8:16
  SPEAKER_01: Because the figures are kind of stable, right?
• 8:18
  SPEAKER_01: And so, but even for people that have come back into the office, in many cases, they're working in highly distributed settings and they're talking to people that aren't even, you know, physically with them.
• 8:27
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 8:28
  SPEAKER_01: I'm I know I mentioned this previously on the podcast.
• 8:30
  SPEAKER_01: We've encountered people, quite a few people, who go to the office every day and they aren't talking to anyone, yeah.
• 8:38
  SPEAKER_01: And and so you you're exactly right.
• 8:41
  SPEAKER_01: This has this has shifted, and particularly the sort of social interaction stuff has atrophied.
• 8:47
  SPEAKER_01: And because we are now in a situation where we've got um the primary party that we're talking to is GPT or is another another form of AI, that's a different form of interaction.
• 9:02
  SPEAKER_01: So on a previous podcast uh a couple of weeks back, we alluded to this.
• 9:06
  SPEAKER_01: We talked about the fact that um GPT, other um uh models by default, their default is sick of fancy.
• 9:16
  SPEAKER_01: So you wind up with uh talking to that all day, then you wind up talking to humans very infrequently that might get kind of bad at it.
• 9:24
  SPEAKER_00: Humans, how boring.
• 9:25
  SPEAKER_00: Uh so so what do you actually do about it?
• 9:27
  SPEAKER_00: How do you keep these rarely used skills warm without turning development into like a whole second job?
• 9:33
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it's a you got you got to make a conscious effort.
• 9:35
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and actually, this is um this is one of the reasons why in my company we've designed the programs in the way that we have, because um, the goal is to get people doing a little bit of you know, like 10 minutes of practice a day in order to be able to keep all of the durable skills, muscles that they need in order to be able to do great work, keeping them fresh.
• 9:57
  SPEAKER_01: Um so that's part of it.
• 9:59
  SPEAKER_01: You need to spend uh you don't have to spend your entire life, right?
• 10:01
  SPEAKER_01: But you need to spend a little bit of time practicing it, just as you would, you know, if you wanted to keep your French good, you'd spend a little bit of a little bit of time practicing that.
• 10:09
  SPEAKER_01: Um so there's that.
• 10:11
  SPEAKER_01: Um uh you need to be doing that, you need to be doing it regularly, you need to be it's like like daily practice, ideally.
• 10:17
  SPEAKER_01: Um and then the other thing is you just gotta seek out opportunities.
• 10:20
  SPEAKER_01: And I I would say seek out opportunities in the individual.
• 10:23
  SPEAKER_01: But if you know you're a team lead, um then um you've got to start thinking about and mapping the durable skills that your that your team needs, and then using projects, using other types of activities in order to be able to make sure that people are getting uh are getting that experience.
• 10:39
  SPEAKER_01: And so we've worked fairly extensively with leaders, with companies to say, okay, yeah, there's here's our programming, but here's also some consulting that we can do with you to help make sure that we're building this continuous skills practice into the day-to-day rhythm of work.
• 10:59
  SPEAKER_01: And if you do that uh mindfully and consistently, then you're gonna have a team that's gonna be able to adapt and adjust to anything even as the style of work changes.
• 11:10
  SPEAKER_00: And that's something to think about if as work shifts to become more generalist.
• 11:14
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 11:15
  SPEAKER_00: Is you know, you have to think about this and have a plan, kind of right?
• 11:19
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 11:20
  SPEAKER_00: Where to double down.
• 11:21
  SPEAKER_01: Where to I mean, two things are happening at the same time, right?
• 11:25
  SPEAKER_01: It's like, yes, work is becoming more general, but also work has this capacity now to sort of shoot off in in different directions, right?
• 11:34
  SPEAKER_01: This thing we had that really began when GPT 3.5 hit and kind of changed how everybody worked, um, something else is gonna happen, right?
• 11:43
  SPEAKER_01: And and we're gonna have to change how we work again.
• 11:45
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, so creating uh a workforce that is highly adaptable, highly resilient, but then also has these other you know sets of really high-defined soft skills is generalist enough um to be able to move from one spot to another is gonna be an enormous part of the future workforce.
• 12:02
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 12:03
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, good stuff.
• 12:04
  SPEAKER_00: Great episode, Paul.
• 12:05
  SPEAKER_00: See you next time.
• 12:06
  unknown: All right.
• 12:07
  SPEAKER_01: Cheers, see ya.
• 12:09
  SPEAKER_00: Humanity Working is produced and edited for Billion Minds by Matt Neo.
• 12:13
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• 12:17
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• 12:19
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