It's not the end of work, it's the end of boring work: ChatGPT may actually be good news for the office

Despite all the dazzling digital advances, the trillions of dollars spent on computer technology have done almost nothing to make the world a more productive place. The economist Robert Solow, who identified this problem, called it the productivity paradox. In 1987, a decade into the computer revolution, he observed that productivity growth had actually slowed down. “You can see the computer age everywhere,” he wrote, “but in the productivity statistics.”

Economists and historians have spent a lot of time scratching their heads about why this might be. But you already know the answer: Software is supposed to make us faster, but often it makes us slower. We spend a half-hour clumsily filling out PDF files that we could have done with pencil and paper in a minute. We spend an hour bouncing emails back and forth to clarify a point that could have been nailed down in 30 seconds on the phone. The digital era has made a lot of everyday work more complicated and less efficient than it was 30 years ago.

The huge productivity gains of the industrial age didn’t happen just because someone invented a new technology; they happened because people also figured out how best to reorganise work around that technology. A steam engine, for example, would have been no use to textile manufacturing if textile workers had remained a scattered network of independent farmers, as opposed to a group of employees gathered under a single factory roof. And conveyor belts were nothing new when Henry Ford put them to use in his factory; the revolution was how he arranged for workers to use them, breaking the complex work of automobile manufacture into repetitive, specific tasks. Ford’s breakthrough was as much organisational as technological.

Computers have failed to produce a huge surge in productivity, but the problem isn’t the computers. It’s that we haven’t let workers tap into the computers’ true power — automation. We still use them like typewriters or calculators.

The arrival of ChatGPT — most of all, its remarkable ability to write computer code to automate well-defined tasks — can change all that. Instead of eliminating many white-collar jobs altogether, as people are understandably worried it will do, it has the ability to do something much more powerful: to eliminate what’s boring about those jobs, freeing us up to be more stimulated, more creative and more human in our work. In the process it can drastically increase productivity.

Most office jobs today are a matter of manipulating data. There are a lot of things AI can’t do, but it’s very good at writing code to manipulate data. Office workers all just got their own personal tech consultant. They just need to learn to use it.

As a historian, I confess that I was quick to sneer at the idea that ChatGPT could ever do any part of my job. I mean, have you ever asked it to interpret the causes of World War I? It gives you a listicle of contributing factors. And the writing — don’t get me started on the writing.

But then I got the idea to ask ChatGPT to write computer code to analyse data sets, which is laborious work that, as an economic historian, I have to do often. There are things I know how to code, and there are things I wish I knew how to code. ChatGPT could do both, easily. Boring, repetitive tasks that I knew a computer should be able to do, but that I didn’t know how to make it do, suddenly became as easy as typing in my request.

If a historian can do it, anybody can.

ChatGPT might not be able to help someone at a medical supply company figure out why and where a particular batch of medicine was misplaced — that might require real ingenuity. But it could take over the tedious business of tracking orders and deliveries on an Excel spreadsheet, creating more time for the clerk to do precisely that kind of more challenging and satisfying problem-solving work.

Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology recently conducted an experiment, reported in a working paper, with 444 “college-educated professionals” who were given a “midlevel professional writing task” like drafting news releases or delicate emails. Half were provided with ChatGPT and half weren’t. The participants who were given ChatGPT took less time, wrote better and reported enjoying the task more. Even more important, perhaps, ChatGPT helped “low-ability workers,” meaning that those with weaker writing skills — but perhaps with good ideas — could carry out the task effectively.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.