An excerpt from "Money Stuff" by Matt Levine:
Many white-collar jobs involve two sorts of tasks:
- 1.
Doing stuff that advances the mission of the company: making sales, building features, writing newsletters, whatever.
- 2.
Looking busy: meeting prospective customers who’ll never buy your stuff, making pipeline spreadsheets so your boss knows about your meetings with prospects who’ll never buy your stuff, staying in the office until your boss leaves, etc.
The first task is the only important one, and most chief executive officers would probably tell you that they only care about employees doing actual work and don’t care about “face time.” But in fact most companies seem to have a lot of face time. The useful work is often less legible and harder to measure than the busywork, so bosses might use the busywork — the dashboards and pipelines and time in the office — as a crude proxy for real work. And employees probably underrate the value of what looks like busywork: Just being at the office a lot can help generate ideas; going to lots of apparently-hopeless sales meetings can sometimes generate sales.
One possibility is that AI will do all of the useful stuff, which will increase the importance of the busywork: White-collar employees will have to spend all their time looking busy so they don’t get fired and replaced by AI. Another possibility is that AI will do all of the useful stuff, which will eliminate the busywork: Face time will stop being a meaningful proxy for productivity, and a new norm will develop of “just have AI do your job and go home.”
But a third, weirder possibility is that AI will take over the job of looking busy. The Financial Times reports:
Amazon employees are using an internal AI tool to automate non-essential tasks in a bid to show managers they are using the technology more frequently.
The Seattle-based group has started to widely deploy its in-house “MeshClaw” product in recent weeks, allowing employees to create AI agents that can connect to workplace software and carry out tasks on a user’s behalf, according to three people familiar with the matter.
Some employees said colleagues were using the software to automate additional, unnecessary AI activity to increase their consumption of tokens — units of data processed by models.
They said the move reflected pressure to adopt the technology after Amazon introduced targets for more than 80 per cent of developers to use AI each week, and earlier this year began tracking AI token consumption on internal leader boards.
“There is just so much pressure to use these tools,” one Amazon employee told the FT. “Some people are just using MeshClaw to maximise their token usage.”
In the olden days people tried to look like they were working late by, like, hanging a jacket over their chairs when they went home, but now autonomous AI agents can automate that.