What AI does to "cognitive class" work, and workers
A recent study is full of interesting surprises. Here are some I couldn't fit into my NY Times story today.
So today I have a short piece in The New York Times on a recent experiment with ChatGPT use by elite workers at Boston Consulting Group. These are the sort of "cognitive class" members whose jobs "everybody knows" — in some woolly way — will be affected by generative AI.
What intrigued me about this study (which you can read here (pdf)) is the way the researchers (Fabrizio Dell'Acqua, Edward McFowland III, Ethan Mollick, Hila Lifshitz-Assaf, Katherine C. Kellogg, Saran Rajendran, Lisa Krayer, François Candelon and Karim R. Lakhani) set out to rigorously replace everybody’s vague generalizations with hard data. They
(a) tested ChatGPT use in a real setting — the multi-task workday of a high-end associates at BCG, one of the world's biggest and best-regarded management consulting firms (BCG people helped design the experiments);
(b) tested it on a lot of people (758, to be exact);
(c) made sure that the consultants had incentives to take the experiment seriously (top s…