+ AI performance in creativity tests
Welcome to Issue 27!
This week:
The future of work
Challenges and opportunities shaping Work:life.
📕 Book: After Work and the wicked problem of domestic labour
🗒 Workers rights with electric vehicle transitions
🗒 Gender based occupational segregation
Trends and signals
Emerging trends in skills, jobs and careers.
🗒 Blue-collar worker influencers
🗒 Starting again at retirement
Know-how
Practical technology skills and knowledge to utilise today.
🗒 Check background info of Google search results
🔍 Research: AI performance in creativity tests
🗒 AI hallucination rates
If you have feedback, or future of work interests you’d like me to address in an upcoming issue, get in touch at worklife[at]edaith.com
Tina
📕 Book: After Work and the wicked problem of domestic labour
The Cowan paradox, coined after historian Ruth Schwartz Cowan, highlights that despite technological advancements in home appliances, the time spent on domestic labour has not decreased since the 1870s.
Helen Hester and Nick Srnicek's book After Work investigates the Cowan paradox and argues that social constructs around cleanliness and domestic roles, alongside manufacturers' interests, maintain the relentless cycle of household chores. The book explores historical and potential communal solutions to reduce the individual burden of domestic work, suggesting that significant social and spatial redesigns are necessary to truly diminish housework and confront the deeper question of what people would do with increased leisure time.
🗒 Workers rights with electric vehicle transitions
The United Auto Workers union has just reached a deal with the three biggest car manufacturers in the U.S. after strikes due to concerns that the shift toward electric vehicles (EVs) could result in the replacement of union jobs with lower-paid, non-union positions, as well as potentially fewer workers overall. The deal will ensure the ability for workers involved in battery manufacturing to negotiate pay and benefits.
🗒 Gender based occupational segregation
Occupational segregation, the gender-based split of men and women between professions, historically has relegated to lower-paying, “support” jobs and men taking the higher-paying, “glamour” jobs. The split starts with teenage workers and although progress has been made in recent years, women are often still performing “feminine” work within male-dominated fields e.g. undertaking marketing, public relations or human resources roles in science, technology and engineering workplaces.
🗒 Blue-collar worker influencers
The word “influencer” normally conjures up thoughts of people in pursuit of some kind of aesthetic or lifestyle perfection. However, on social media the growing appetite for authenticity and people in real unfiltered or staged situations is seeing blue-collar workers building substantial audiences via sharing videos related to their jobs, offering a window into their lives and work, including:
A tree trimmer - 240,000 followers
A sheep herder - 100,000 followers
A pilot - 400,000 followers
A dog groomer - 2.3 million followers
Fast food restaurant worker - 11 million followers
Love the impact the sheep herder is having with this work:
“Ms. Jackson said that, while growing up, she didn’t know farming was something you could do for a living without being born into it, and she had no female role models. She frequently hears from women from all walks of life who thank her for showing her day-to-day life. “It’s women in general being a bit more brave and trying things society thinks they shouldn’t,” Ms. Jackson said.”
🔗 TikTok’s Finest Lobsterman (NY Times)
🗒 Starting again at retirement
Although the Stanford program discussed for people to reorient themselves when retiring from their careers is a luxury not accessible to most, it’s certainly covering some universal lessons that would be useful for everyone:
She reflected on one of the things she had learned during her second education in the Stanford DCI program: “It’s all about putting myself in situations in which I know nothing. I can fail big. Who gives a shit? I’m 64.”
🔗 The New Old Age. What a new life stage can teach the rest of us about how to find meaning and purpose—before it’s too late (The Atlantic)
🗒 Check background info of Google search results
I just checked none of these are available to Australian users yet for images; let me know if it’s working where you’re at :)
Currently with Google searches the three little dots alongside each search result listing title provides an ‘About this result’ Beta feature that shows information on the website, including when it was first indexed and if it is being shown because of personalisation.
Unfortunately, this information is probably not reliable or helpful. For example, my website edaith.com shows as being first indexed in 2019, but I didn’t purchase the domain or start using it until 2023. Perhaps the address was used by someone else, but regardless this feature may give people the impression that websites or activities associated with them are much more established (and thus legitimate) than they actually are.
Other initiatives to increase transparency of information sources:
🔗 OpenAI has a tool to check if an image is AI-generated but is debating when to release it because it is ‘really good’ but still not accurate enough (TechCrunch)
🔗 Leica added support for the Content Authenticity Initiative, an industry body that aims to embed certificates in images (Content Authenticity Initiative)
🔍 Research: AI performance in creativity tests
In an experimental paper, researchers found that AI can generate creative ideas in real-life, practical situations and it can also help people generate better ideas.
The ideas AI models generated were rated as being better than what most people can come up with, but very creative people will beat the AI (at least for now), and may benefit less from using AI to generate ideas.
There is more underlying similarity in the ideas that the current generation of AIs produce than among ideas generated by a large number of humans.
🔗 Artificial muses: Generative Artificial Intelligence Chatbots Have Risen to Human-Level Creativity (Arxiv)
🗒 AI hallucination rates
A new start-up called Vectara, founded by former Google employees, is researching the extent that chatbots provide false information:
“... hallucination rates vary widely among the leading A.I. companies. OpenAI’s technologies had the lowest rate, around 3 percent. Systems from Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, hovered around 5 percent. The Claude 2 system offered by Anthropic, an OpenAI rival also based in San Francisco, topped 8 percent. A Google system, Palm chat, had the highest rate at 27 percent.”
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