The future belongs to organisations that seek the 'pain'
The Problem of Pain
Managers must lead people into painful work. Humans dislike pain. We go to great lengths to avoid it; it is an instinct that helps us survive.
Yet there is a dark side to all instincts. The same drive that is necessary for survival can keep us prisoners to an undesirable status quo. This pain avoiding instinct can dissuade us from choosing strenuous physical and mental activity. And so we may remain in a state of weakness, mental atrophy and general ill health, seemingly unable or unwilling to choose the activities that would build our strength, mental acuity and wellness.
Writing is necessary, writing is painful
Writing is cognitively painful. During the process of writing we create, define and test ideas. Students have long procrastinated the writing of an essay to delay the pain. There have always been some who avoid the pain entirely by plagiarising or outsourcing the writing to another. Not much changes once students become professionals. The time constraints of professional life only increase the pain of writing and therefore, thinking. It can feel wasteful spending so much time for what feels, in the moment, like so little output.
AI and Pain
Frontier Large Language Models (LLMs, i.e. generative AI) have proven that they are very good at writing. Over 80% of students now use LLMs to assist them in writing assessments. Use within organisations has skyrocketed. Professionals everywhere are rejoicing at the utility of this technology to reduce their pain.
What is the problem with professionals outsourcing tedious writing to LLMs?
LLMs have three hidden tendencies:
To regress towards the mean of its training data.
To be constrained by uncertain ‘guardrails’.
To ‘please’ the user interacting with it.
Combine this with a desire to avoid cognitive ‘pain’ and the outcome of writing with AI is detrimental to any organisation committed to innovation. Ideas will conform to an average; pre-conceived notions will be reinforced.
Choosing Pain
Please note that these risks exist whenever people within organisations are committed to avoiding pain, even without LLMs. In fact, AI when harnessed by curiosity and commitment to deeper thought can connect the human thinkers to ideas that they were blind to. AI can foster innovation.
But not when it is seen as just another tool to ‘make life easier’.
The revolution being wrought by LLMs is going to be navigated best by organisations that use LLMs to hurt their brains, not numb them.
"Change your lens from 'how can AI make life easier' to 'how can AI make me work harder, push my thinking deeper?' That is where your competitive advantage lives."
