Ethan Mollick explores the impending crisis of meaning at work triggered by the integration of generative AI into everyday tools, symbolized by "The Button" - Google Docs' "Help me write" button using Bard, soon coming to Microsoft Office with GPT-4.

The temptation of the button

Faced with a blank page, people will press The Button. Adoption becomes trivial once AI integrates into familiar tools (like Adobe Photoshop). Students, managers, professors, scientists - all will use this button to generate first drafts of essays, emails, reports, feedback, grants. Cognitive anchoring means that even completely rewritten drafts will carry an AI imprint.

Setting time on fire

Mollick introduces the central concept: much work is time-consuming by design. A professor's recommendation letter takes time because that effort signals genuine support for the candidate. "We are setting our time on fire to signal to others that this letter is worth reading." But with The Button, an excellent letter can be generated in seconds.

He demonstrates this with a concrete example: a minimal prompt produces via GPT-4 a recommendation letter "better than most letters I receive," addressing the job requirements point by point with plausible details (albeit invented, but easily correctable through interaction with the AI). A moral dilemma emerges: using AI might serve the student better than a mediocre human-written letter.

Documents turned into empty signals

Performance reviews, strategic memos, college essays, grants, speeches - all these documents where written output signals thoughtfulness and time invested lose their value. With AI-to-AI workflows (AI-generated documents sent to AI email inboxes), tasks become "mere ceremony" - organizational rituals with no real utility.

Crisis of meaning

92% of workers consider their job socially useful. Research shows that AI initially increases job satisfaction - the worst tasks disappear, allowing focus on meaningful work. But when meaningful documents become easy to outsource, or when one realizes that no human actually reads our reports, meaning evaporates. Centuries-old approaches to filtering and signaling through written effort lose all value.

An emancipatory opportunity

Mollick sees a potentially empowering outcome: liberation from busy-work and mere ceremony. No longer having to "set our time on fire" as a signal. But this requires organizational thoughtfulness - leaders redesigning work for the "AI-haunted" world. The incentives are enormous: eliminating meaningless work reduces the burden on workers while removing inefficiencies.

Urgency

This transformation requires no AI more advanced than what already existed in June 2023. It is already underway in education (AI-generated essays). Without proactive thinking now, multiple crises of meaning will hit various professions as The Button becomes widespread.