Miscredit

When reading posts from people who understand generative automation, and the skills to use it well, as being the future of work, it starts to sound like financial credit.

The person who has managed their finances well enough that they don’t need to borrow money to fund their lifestyle finds themselves penalized for that. So credit stops being a tool that is employed because it’s the best tool for the job at hand, but simply for its own sake, because one isn’t allowed to employ it for important things unless one has demonstrated that they’ve employed it for trivial things. (And not essential things... if a bank comes to feel that one actually relied on credit cards and other small iterations of revolving credit, then that’s a risk factor.)

Generative automation is moving in the same direction. I saw a post a while back where the poster notes that misusing an LLM to prepare for an interview is a yellow flag for them, but a candidate being proud of the fact that they didn’t need to use one at all is a red flag. And it wasn’t the first time I’ve seen this idea that generative automation should be used, simply for the sake of using it, rather than it’s the best or most effective tool for the job at hand.

If we understand that locking credit behind unnecessary borrowing (with all of its attendant costs) is pointless and wasteful, it shouldn’t be that much of a stretch to see expecting people to use generative automation, just so they can say they’ve used generative automation is the same. Generative automation is a good tool. But it’s not the only tool. Treating it as indispensable, regardless of the task at hand, in the present, on the assumption that it will one day get there, is premature.