The Mantra of This AI Age: Don’t Repeat Yourself

There’s a certain irony in re-publishing a piece about not repeating yourself, but Dan Shipper’s essay from last year is particularly apt while we wrap up second-quarter planning at Every. One area of focus is how to use AI to capture commonly given feedback so we can focus on more complex issues. The reality is that for all of us, much of our daily work consists of repetition—whether that’s founders telling their origin story for the hundredth time, teams answering the same questions over and over, or managers continually identifying similar areas for improvement. By reframing our understanding of what AI does well—handling those repetitive tasks—we can reclaim that time for more creative endeavors.—Kate Lee

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Contrary to popular belief, this generation of artificial intelligence technology is not going to replace every single job. It’s not going to lead employers to fire every knowledge worker. It’s not going to obviate the need for human writing. It’s not going to destroy the world. We don’t have to strafe the data centers or storm Silicon Valley’s top labs.The current generation of AI technology doesn’t live up to the AGI hype in that it can’t figure out problems that it hasn’t encountered, in some way, during its training. Neither does it learn from experience. It struggles with modus ponens. It is not a god.

It does, however, very much live up to the hype in that it’s broadly useful for a dizzying variety of tasks, performing at an expert level for many of them. In a sense, it’s like having 10,000 Ph.D.’s available at your fingertips.

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Become a paid subscriber to Every to unlock the rest of this piece and read about:

• The allocation economy: Humans as strategic directors of AI
• Repetition revealed: AI exposes and eliminates drudgery
• Founders, take note: Your job is more repetitive than you think