Close Menu
    Trending
    • Amsterdam Bans Meat Ads As The War On Food Expands
    • Katie Holmes And Joshua Jackson Spark ‘Soul-Level’ Love Chatter
    • Singapore Airlines, Southwest Airlines partner to expand access to nearly 120 US destinations
    • Trump warns Netanyahu: ‘You’ll be on your own’ if attacks on Iran continue | US-Israel war on Iran News
    • Cristiano Ronaldo, ‘The Bosnian Diamond’ headline the World Cup 40-and-over club
    • How housing market inventory is shifting across every state
    • What is a ‘normal’ memory slowdown, and when should I worry?
    • Ariana Grande And Ethan Slater Are ‘Still Friends’ Following Split
    Benjamin Franklin Institute
    Tuesday, June 9
    • Home
    • Politics
    • Business
    • Science
    • Technology
    • Arts & Entertainment
    • International
    Benjamin Franklin Institute
    Home»Opinions»Opinion | Do A.I. Agents Actually Make You More Productive?
    Opinions

    Opinion | Do A.I. Agents Actually Make You More Productive?

    Team_Benjamin Franklin InstituteBy Team_Benjamin Franklin InstituteFebruary 25, 2026No Comments5 Mins Read
    Share Facebook Twitter Pinterest Copy Link LinkedIn Tumblr Email VKontakte Telegram
    Share
    Facebook Twitter Pinterest Email Copy Link


    I have found it myself hard to look at this and look at what people are doing and look at them bragging on different social media platforms about the number of agents they now have running on their behalf, and telling the difference between people enjoying the feeling of screwing around with a new technology and some actually transformative expansion and capabilities that the people now have. So maybe to ground this a little bit, I mean, you just talked about a kind of fun side project in your species simulator, either in Anthropic or more broadly, what are people doing with these systems that seems actually useful? So this morning, a colleague of mine said, hey, I want to take a piece of technology we have called Claude Interviewer, which is a system where we can get Claude to interview people, and we use it for a range of social science bits of research. He wants to extend it in some way that involves touching another part of Anthropic’s infrastructure. He slacked a colleague who owns that bit of infrastructure and said, hey, I want to do this thing. Let’s meet tomorrow. And the guy said, “Absolutely. Here are the five software packages you should have Claude read before our meeting and summarize for you.” And I think that’s a really good illustration where this gnarly engineering project, which would previously have taken a lot longer and many people, is now going to mostly be done by two people agreeing on the goal and having their Claudes read some documentation and agree on how to implement the thing. Another example is a colleague recently wrote a post about how they’re working using agents, and it looks almost like an idealized life that many of us might want, where it’s like, I wake up in the morning, I think about the research that I want. I tell five different Claudes to do it, then I go for a run, then I come back from a run and I look at the results, and then I ask two other Claudes to study the results, figure out which direction is best and do that. Then I go for a walk and then I come back. And it just looks like this really fun existence where they have completely upended how work works for them. And they’re both much more effective. But also they’re now spending most of their time on the actual hard part, which is figuring out what do we use our human agency to do. And they’re working really hard to figure out anything that isn’t the special kind of genius and creativity of being a person. How do I get the A.I. system to do it for me? Because it probably can if I ask it the right way. Are they much more effective? I mean this very seriously. One of my biggest concerns about where we’re going here is that people have a, I think, mistaken theory of the human mind that operates for many of us, as if — I always call it the matrix theory of the human mind. Everybody wants the little port in the back of your head that you just download information into. My experience being a reporter and doing the show for a long time is that human creativity and thinking and ideas is inextricably bound up in the labor of learning, the writing of first drafts. So when I hear — right, I have producers on the show and I could say to my producers before an interview with Jack Clark or an interview with someone else, go read all the stuff, go read the books, give me your report, then I’ll walk into the room having read the report. I don’t find that works. I need to do all that reading too. And then we talk about it and we’re passing it back and forth. I worry that what we’re doing is a quite profound offloading of tasks that are laborious. It makes us feel very productive to be presented with eight research reports after our morning run. But actually what would be productive is doing the research. There’s obviously some balance. I do have producers and people and companies do have employees. But how do you know people are getting more productive versus they have sent computers off on a huge amount of busywork, and they are now the bottleneck. And what they’re now going to spend all their time doing is absorbing B-plus-level reports from an A.I. system, as opposed to — that kind of shortcuts the actual thinking and learning process that leads to real creativity. I turn this back and say I think most people, at least this has been my experience, can do about two to four hours of genuinely useful creative work a day. And after that, you’re, in my experience, you’re trying to do all the turn-your-brain-off schlep work that surrounds that work. Now, I’ve found that I can just be spending those two to four hours a day on the actual creative hard work. And if I’ve got any of this schlep work, I increasingly delegate it to A.I. systems. It does, though, mean that we are going to be in a very dangerous situation as a species, where some people have the luxury of having time to spend on developing their skills, or the personality, inclination or job that forces them to. Other people might just fall into being entertained and passively consuming this stuff, and having this junk-food work experience where it looks to the outside like you’re being very productive, but you’re not learning. And I think that’s going to require us to have to change not just how education works, but how work works, and develop some real strategies for making sure people are actually exercising their mind with this stuff.



    Source link

    Share. Facebook Twitter Pinterest LinkedIn Tumblr Email Telegram Copy Link

    Related Posts

    Opinions

    Opinion | Why People Are Obsessed With Platner

    June 8, 2026
    Opinions

    Opinion | For Trump, the World Is for the Taking

    June 7, 2026
    Opinions

    Opinion | Graham Platner and the Rise of the ‘Dirtbag’ Democrat

    June 6, 2026
    Opinions

    Opinion | Bronze Age Pervert’s ‘Cosplay’ Masculinity

    June 6, 2026
    Opinions

    Opinion | A Dark Vision of Masculinity

    June 5, 2026
    Opinions

    Opinion | The New Right’s Very Old Vision of Men

    June 5, 2026
    Editors Picks

    Latest college football transfer portal winners and losers

    January 21, 2026

    New Scientist recommends pioneering artist Ryoji Ikeda’s new work

    February 1, 2026

    Trump hopeful of Iran deal after Tehran warns of regional war

    February 2, 2026

    Why Is Keynesian Economics Collapsing?

    December 29, 2025

    Megyn Kelly Under Fire After Leveling Personal Attack Against Chris Cuomo

    February 20, 2026
    About Us
    About Us

    Welcome to Benjamin Franklin Institute, your premier destination for insightful, engaging, and diverse Political News and Opinions.

    The Benjamin Franklin Institute supports free speech, the U.S. Constitution and political candidates and organizations that promote and protect both of these important features of the American Experiment.

    We are passionate about delivering high-quality, accurate, and engaging content that resonates with our readers. Sign up for our text alerts and email newsletter to stay informed.

    Latest Posts

    Amsterdam Bans Meat Ads As The War On Food Expands

    June 9, 2026

    Katie Holmes And Joshua Jackson Spark ‘Soul-Level’ Love Chatter

    June 9, 2026

    Singapore Airlines, Southwest Airlines partner to expand access to nearly 120 US destinations

    June 9, 2026

    Subscribe for Updates

    Stay informed by signing up for our free news alerts.

    Paid for by the Benjamin Franklin Institute. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate’s committee.
    • Privacy Policy
    • About us
    • Contact us

    Type above and press Enter to search. Press Esc to cancel.