“Workers do report, though, that the intensity of their work has increased after the adoption of AI in their workplaces.” A new crop of artificial intelligence tools carries the promise of streamlining tasks, improving efficiency […]
arketyp. News Feed
Digital, tech & innovation narratives curated from across the web
Category: Workplace
The Teetering Tech Office
Meta and Twitter are shedding square footage, while Amazon and Google aren’t giving up the dream. Tech was going to save commercial real estate. At least it seemed that way, briefly, in 2020: Apple took […]
Influencers Are Realizing That A.I. Might Not Be a Magic Money-Making Machine For Artists After All
The curious odyssey of drop-shipping entrepreneur Patryk Marketer. For the last few months, I have been following the adventures of a drop-shipping entrepreneur who goes by the name of “Patryk Marketer.” A video by Marketer […]
Actors Say Hollywood Studios Want Their AI Replicas — For Free, Forever
During yesterday’s press conference in which Hollywood actors confirmed that they were going on strike, SAG-AFTRA’s chief negotiator, revealed a proposal from Hollywood studios that sounds ripped right out of a Black Mirror episode. In […]
The Rise of the AI Engineer
Emergent capabilities are creating an emerging title: to wield them, we’ll have to go beyond the Prompt Engineer and write *software*. We are observing a once in a generation “shift right” of applied AI, fueled […]
We’re Now Finding Out The Damaging Results of The Mandated Return to Office
Companies knew the mandated return to the office would cause some attrition, however, they were not prepared for the serious problems that would present. Unispace finds that nearly half (42%) of companies that mandated office […]
The People Paid to Train AI are Outsourcing Their Work… to AI
It’s a practice that could introduce further errors into already error-prone models. It takes an incredible amount of data to train AI systems to perform specific tasks accurately and reliably. Many companies pay gig workers […]
The Reddit Blackout Is Breaking Reddit
When the user revolt ends — if it ever does — Reddit’s community won’t ever be the same. Reddit’s decision to charge for access to its API risks putting the company in a death spiral […]
Your Job is (Probably) Safe from AI
AI may change the world in ways that today are impossible to imagine. But this is not quite the same thing as turning the economy upside down. In the 1960s Robert Fogel published work about […]
AI Anxiety
Some workers report starting to feel anxious about their futures and whether the skills they have will be relevant to the labour market in years to come. In March, Goldman Sachs published a report showing […]
The Managerialist Takeover of General Motors
Michele Zanini muses on Bob Lutz’s excellent book, “Car Guys vs. Bean Counters.” Up until the early 1960s, General Motors’ design and engineering prowess dominated the industry. The most talented designers aspired to work in […]
Setting Time on Fire and the Temptation of The Button
We used to consider writing an indication of time and effort spent on a task. That isn’t true anymore. Google have added a button to Google Docs. It says “Help me write.” When you push […]
On-Boarding Your AI Intern
There’s a somewhat weird alien who wants to work for free for you. You should probably get started. Perhaps one of the most interesting aspects of our current AI moment is that several billion people […]
Microsoft Work Trend Index: AI Will Work Alongside Employees
Artificial intelligence could enhance, not replace, jobs, Microsoft says. But AI still needs human input and emotional intelligence. Will generative artificial intelligence replace jobs or enhance them? That’s the question Microsoft set out to answer […]
Dropbox Blames AI For Cutting 16% Of Its Workforce
Dropbox says it’s cutting 500 jobs because the company wants to grasp the opportunities presented by AI. A blog post from the company’s CEO, Drew Houston, claims the company is keen to exploit the benefits […]
Workers Using ChatGPT to Work Multiple Jobs
OpenAI’s buzzy artificial-intelligence tool ChatGPT is reportedly helping people hold down multiple jobs while keeping employers in the dark. Vice’s Motherboard interviewed several workers about how they were using ChatGPT in their daily work lives. […]
The Theology of the Leadership Pipeline
What business books discuss—leadership, governance, and culture—is the bread and butter of theology, both Biblical and natural. There is no way to understand the world without appealing to these terms. Even an atheistic worldview takes […]
GPT-4 Hired Unwitting TaskRabbit Worker By Pretending to Be ‘Vision-Impaired’ Human
The test was part of a series of experiments to see if OpenAI’s latest GPT model could perform “power-seeking” behavior. As part of a test to see whether OpenAI’s latest version of GPT could exhibit […]
Even Hackers are Getting Laid Off by Organised Crime Groups
Hackers and others perpetuating ransomware threats seem to be the latest tech industry workers navigating a shaky job market. As US Department of Justice investigators and companies beef up their oversight of cybersecurity threats, the […]
Nearly 30% of Work Remains Remote as Workers Dig In
Nearly 30 percent of all work happened at home in January, six times the rate in 2019, according to WFH Research, a data-collection project. The COVID-19 pandemic transformed the American workplace. The share of all […]
What Ails Google and How It Can Turn Things Around
Can Google achieve a “soft-landing” — i.e. gradually transform and become a powerhouse again while continuing to grow steadily? I joined Google just before the pandemic when the company I had co-founded, AppSheet, was acquired […]
The Tao of Alibaba
In “The Tao of Alibaba”, Brian A. Wong explores the philosophy behind the retail giant and its effects on China’s decades-long economic transformation. The visionary thinker R. Buckminster Fuller articulated a philosophical, almost spiritual faith […]
The Human Behind The Curtain
Behind the AI chatbots and delivery robots are human workers, hidden from sight, keeping everything running. Since ChatGPT took the world by storm last fall, people have been in a frenzy debating the impact artificial […]
Tech CEOs Screwed Up
Given the human and business downsides of layoffs, a CEO’s top priority should be to avoid them at all costs. Some companies have managed to do just that. Apple has managed to cut costs without […]
What the Tech and Media Layoffs Are Really Telling Us About the Economy
About 130,000 people have been dismissed from their jobs at large tech and media companies in the past 12 months. Why? These layoff announcements have become depressingly common, even rote. But they’re also kind of […]
Extremely Hardcore
Twitter’s staff spent years trying to protect the platform against impulsive ranting billionaires — then one made himself the CEO. In April 2022, Elon Musk acquired a 9.2 percent stake in Twitter, making him the […]
Alphabet Swings Axe as Big Tech Retreats from Pandemic Boom
Google parent to cut 12,000 jobs as tech sector sheds more than 200,000 posts over 12 months. Google’s parent company will axe 12,000 staff, pushing total tech job losses in the past 12 months above […]
The $2 Per Hour Workers Who Made ChatGPT Safer
OpenAI Used Kenyan Workers on Less Than $2 Per Hour to Make ChatGPT Less Toxic. ChatGPT was hailed as one of 2022’s most impressive technological innovations upon its release last November. The powerful artificial intelligence […]
Office Shock
COVID-19, with all its tragic consequences, also created an opportunity to ask this basic question: why do we work in offices at all? In their book, Office Shock: Creating Better Futures for Working and Living, […]
Why AI-Optimized Workflows Aren’t Always Best for Business
When optimization goes wrong: AI can’t see humans behind the data points. Workflow and process inefficiencies can cost up to 40% of a company’s annual revenue. In many instances, companies seek to resolve this issue […]