AI can rob us of the pleasure of task completion and the joy of developing insights

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When AI handles most of the items that normally populate our to-do list, where will we find satisfaction and meaning in our work?

by Harvey Schachter

One of the joys of our day can be scratching a big, fat line through an item on our to-do list. Digital task lists even try to replicate this pen-and-paper moment because of the satisfaction it provides. We like to get things done.

But entrepreneur FAISAL HOQUE says artificial intelligence is going to diminish our sense of “I did this!” As AI continues to develop and we become more comfortable using it, more and more of our cognitive work will get offloaded to digital helpers.

“But what is then left for us? When AI handles most of the items that normally populate our to-do list, where will we find satisfaction and meaning in our work?” he writes in Psychology Today.

Get set to feel distanced from your work in an AI Age. Human beings derive satisfaction from effort and creation. Psychologists, in what is known as the IKEA effect, have found we value things more when we build them ourselves.

“But AI allows us to have the product without going through the process. We’re left with output – often excellent output – but without the pride, the ownership, the sense of accomplishment that comes from having truly created something. And this strips away a crucial part of what makes work satisfying in the first place: The effort that goes into making it, the effort that allows us to say: I did that,” he says.

We will have to see our work more as orchestrating and less as doing. But that means no longer seeing success as completing an item on our task list – which probably has not been the best gauge of meaningful accomplishment anyway.

“Instead of asking, ‘What tasks did I complete today?’ we must shift to asking: ‘What changed because of my work today?’ Who did I help? What problem did I solve? What became possible? And when we ask the new questions, it becomes irrelevant whether AI drafted an email or not, because what matters isn’t who wrote the first draft, it’s whether the final result created value for someone who needed it,” he says.

📍 Read the fullThe Globe and Mai article here.

📍 Read our full Psychology Today article, The Vanishing Sense of “I Did This”, here.

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