Hours and Hours

Or, it could help eliminate about one job in eighty...

For starters, I swear I don't understand this whole holding up a whiteboard thing. It's an open invitation for someone to come along, Photoshop out whatever message was originally written on the whiteboard, and paste in their own message. As I'm sure was done here.

But more to the point, when I saw this advertisement on LinkedIn, the first thing that popped into my head was: "Just how big is the labor force in the United States, anyway?" And a helpful outfit called Statista informed me that as of October, there were 133.89 million full-time workers in the country. This leaves out part-time workers, and I'll use that to justify rounding up to 134 million people. And spread across that many people, 78 million hours doesn't go very far. In fact, it's just shy of 35 minutes a person.

And, having been in the workforce for as long as I have, for so many different employers over the years, I can tell you that there an awful lot of ways to give a lot of people 35 minutes back over the course of a week... no real need for technological hype there.

But I think that companies feel the need to make it clear to everyone that they've embraced the new thing that's going around and are keeping up with the times. But generative automation isn't magic. It can't even manage to make a decent Christmas party illustration reliably:

Don't even get me started on that guy's hat...

So I have a sneaking suspicion that a good portion of that time savings is going to come from people simply taking whatever garbage the "A.I." spits out and going with it. After all, this picture came from an invitation to the Christmas party of a local professional organization. If a cheesy stock photograph of a bunch of laughing young people in stereotypical Christmas sweaters is going to break the budget, maybe someone needs to figure out where all of the dues money is going.

Color me dubious, therefore that this time savings, if it materializes at all, is going to work out like it's being made out to.