I think a new phenomena began in 1972 with the release of the HP-35 scientific pocket calculator. This is the escalating scale of productivity. Every year that goes by, we are expected to be more productive as individual task workers. That is exponentially increasing. For my entire life, I have been on this ever-increasing expectation of personal productivity brought on by innovation. This is not going to stop anytime soon. My only choice is to quit, die, or both.
Let me explain what is going on. Before the invention of the scientific pocket calculator, calculations were done by hand. Manual instruments were used, such as a slide rule and other conveniences, but for the most part, the output of a human was generally fixed when it came to this type of work. Sure, the typewriter was an invention, but it was not until 1971, when the first real word processors hit the market, that individual human productivity for task type of work took off. The expectation of the amount of work produced by a single human has been ever-increasing in almost every profession brought on by innovation.
When we were a largely agrarian society, meaning 95% of the population worked on farms, the expectation of productivity was rather fixed. You knew exactly how many radishes a person could pick in a duration of time in fieldwork. How many sheep could be sheared, and how many fence holes could be dug in a span of a day. The human calculation was really rather simple. With the advent of innovation, we are under pressure to help realize the purpose of innovation: to replace people with more productivity per individual.
In my early days of teaching computer science, I joked that the primary ambition of the computer science profession was to “get rid of people.” That does not seem like so much of a joke anymore, but rather a cold reality. Technology is rapidly increasing the productivity demands of a single individual, and there is no slowdown. Consider how much you can now accomplish in a short period of time with your mobile phone. This has become the task worker’s command station. Now, here is something essential to consider. When an innovation first comes out, the smart and quick task workers will enjoy a brief hiatus. They will use innovation to do more work, give themselves a break, or improve their working conditions. However, as productivity gains are realized, the smart task worker is expected to do more because the number of people who perform the given set of tasks will be reduced.
The task worker will complain, of course. They will lament the layoffs and cutbacks, all the while using the new software, technology, and innovation to do far more than they used to do when they were without it. This is by design; this is on purpose, and what is occurring in the business is catching up to the money it spent on the innovation and realizing its return. This company you are working for may not realise the gain; it could be an entire industry, and this can feel overwhelming. So you keep embracing innovation, you keep learning to use it faster than other people, and therefore, you get allocated more work. You are on the escalating scale, and there is no getting off. You just have to keep up, taking on more and more responsibility with each new innovation that comes around.
Now I know you task masters out there have been loving AI tools. You are faster than everyone else; you have learned the tools and are trying new things. You quickly dispatch common repetitive tasks with ease, and you enjoy a slight amount of relief from it. However, the time is coming, and that has probably already started, where the industry will catch up, and when it does, you will be asked to do all of that and more as your normal course. AI has just multiplied your workload requirements by magnitudes. It is not that AI is going to replace you; it is that AI is going to replace everyone else, and you will be expected to produce all that output as well. Welcome to the machine! This is the chase I have been on since the early 70s, and it continues.
Will this ever end? I do not know. Not anytime soon. A complete social collapse or something, or perhaps some economic shift away from humans being the primary worker quotient. We are many decades away from that upheaval, so in our lifetime, we get to enjoy the steep climb of productivity with whatever innovation comes our way. It is almost like the hive mind knows of this issue, as young people get trained early to join the task worker world with early gaming and social media and learn how to gain the “edge” via videos. There is now an army of “solo-prenuers” out there that make their money by teaching us, the class of task workers, how to be more productive than ever before. That is only occurring because of the pressure and demand of unrealized productivity gains from new innovation. Sorry, Tim Ferris, but the 4-hour work week you created for the volume of work in 2007 has now increased by 20-fold. So you either get better at doing 20X the job and keep your 4 hours, or you work 80-hour work weeks.
Sorry, there are no revelations today. I just had this epiphany as I was typing on a gaming keyboard designed for highly rapid keystroke control, watching input from my three monitors, laptop, tablet, and phone, and dealing with critical alerts coming from an entire stack of productivity tools that I have been on this train since I was in high school. I am acutely aware that I am slowing down, too. Despite my decades of experience living on the edge of innovation, there is an army of youngsters who could displace me in a heartbeat. I will get taken out by a headshot the second I enter into their game. Here, I used to be the slayer, no more. Now, I check my tasks off like a good little worker bee.
