There's a lot to unpack in that post. And, while I never had a personal assistant, I did depend on secretaries to type up memos early in my career. One or two were good; others struggled to get something mostly correct through multiple iterations.
And even a bit later--in the computer biz--there were some senior managers who had their secretaries/admins print out their emails. They'd handwrite responses, and have the secretaries/admins type them in and email them. (Though the email was only internal to the company at that point.)
I don't disagree with or even lament the sentiment that a lot of secretarial work has basically been smeared across a large number of workers. While a personal assistant can be useful for some people with very busy lives, I honestly never found a shared assistant/secretary terribly useful especially as computer-based tools came into the picture and got better.
Some real gold from SuburbanWhiteChick in the comments:
Fifth. Computerization has not improved standards; it has merely homogenized them. When humans do work, even soul-killing work, they either get bored and get out or they start to slack or sabotage or, in the overwhelming majority of cases, they start to pay attention and make it matter, they get fussy, they figure out how to do it better. When computerization was introduced in the offices in the 80s (I was there) there was more hue and cry among the clerks and secretaries that they were being asked to do a worse job only faster, than among those who objected to learning the computer, and this applied not just to document production / handling and records management but to communication protocols. When companies ordered their clerical workers to fit their duodecahedronal tasks into square computerized holes, data was lost forever, as well as these workers' hard-won, thoughtfully developed methods of tracking and processing data.
This is PRECISELY the divide I see in engineering today - those temperamentally inclined to do things well / keep learning are entering a very exciting time. Those inclined to clock punch are rightly worried.
I read that the other way round. People who cared about their work struggled because they were expected to do more work of lower quality. The clock punchers learned the new tool and carried on clock punching.
I love tables. If I can replace a paragraph with a table I usually do, to a fault. In college I was a research assistant in a bio lab and got assigned gobs of tables and charts to make. The way my boss did it, it was a highly non trivial task that required understanding the whole mission in general and experiment in particular. I was effectively his secretary, but it wasn't a shallow thing, it required domain expertise, which is common in secretarial work.
But if I were now that professor I'd fire me, just because he could generate the table five times in the time it would take me to start the task. Maybe I could do better than the LLM on the first pass, but I couldn't keep up with the machine on the iterations, and the end result is a better match to the intention.
And now the same budget can go to an actual researcher rather than the assistant. There really isn't a limit to the amount of valuable research to be done. Empowering is the right word for this technology.
I was a executive assistant when in college twenty years ago. Recognizing the writing on the wall and the fact that EA never translated into the E-suite was a huge motivator for moving past an associates degree and continuing education instead, with a left turn into computer engineering eventually. If the economy won't let me be a computer at the very least I can understand and work to build computers instead.
There's a lot to unpack in that post. And, while I never had a personal assistant, I did depend on secretaries to type up memos early in my career. One or two were good; others struggled to get something mostly correct through multiple iterations.
And even a bit later--in the computer biz--there were some senior managers who had their secretaries/admins print out their emails. They'd handwrite responses, and have the secretaries/admins type them in and email them. (Though the email was only internal to the company at that point.)
I don't disagree with or even lament the sentiment that a lot of secretarial work has basically been smeared across a large number of workers. While a personal assistant can be useful for some people with very busy lives, I honestly never found a shared assistant/secretary terribly useful especially as computer-based tools came into the picture and got better.
Some real gold from SuburbanWhiteChick in the comments:
This is PRECISELY the divide I see in engineering today - those temperamentally inclined to do things well / keep learning are entering a very exciting time. Those inclined to clock punch are rightly worried.I read that the other way round. People who cared about their work struggled because they were expected to do more work of lower quality. The clock punchers learned the new tool and carried on clock punching.
It is fascinating, that you took that quote and, somehow, managed to arrive at the opposite conclusion, while presenting this quote as confirmation.
I love tables. If I can replace a paragraph with a table I usually do, to a fault. In college I was a research assistant in a bio lab and got assigned gobs of tables and charts to make. The way my boss did it, it was a highly non trivial task that required understanding the whole mission in general and experiment in particular. I was effectively his secretary, but it wasn't a shallow thing, it required domain expertise, which is common in secretarial work.
But if I were now that professor I'd fire me, just because he could generate the table five times in the time it would take me to start the task. Maybe I could do better than the LLM on the first pass, but I couldn't keep up with the machine on the iterations, and the end result is a better match to the intention.
And now the same budget can go to an actual researcher rather than the assistant. There really isn't a limit to the amount of valuable research to be done. Empowering is the right word for this technology.
I was a executive assistant when in college twenty years ago. Recognizing the writing on the wall and the fact that EA never translated into the E-suite was a huge motivator for moving past an associates degree and continuing education instead, with a left turn into computer engineering eventually. If the economy won't let me be a computer at the very least I can understand and work to build computers instead.
> clerical work
Ah yes: reading religious tomes, preaching, healing injured adventurers with divine magic.