The question behind AI panic: What happens to me if it works?

Christoph Trattner is a professor of information science at the University of Bergen and the founding director of SFI MediaFutures, a Norwegian research center for responsible media technology.

Imagine your boss praising a report you finished with AI. A job that once took an afternoon was done in an hour. You checked the result, and it was good.

Do you mention the AI?

Tell your boss, and you might become the person everyone turns to for help with the new technology. Better assignments could follow, perhaps a pay rise or promotion. Keep quiet, and you can enjoy being seen as unusually good at your job.

But there is another possibility. Your boss looks at what you have done and wonders whether a team of three could become a team of one. Suddenly, the discovery that made you feel brilliant also makes you nervous. And silence offers no guarantee: a colleague might find a way to automate part of your job first.

That is the panic. It is not that people cannot use the tool. It is that showing how much faster they are may be how the job gets smaller. The worry reaches people who know exactly how to use AI, because the question is not how it works but what happens after it does. No explanation of the technology can answer that.

Glean, a workplace AI company, surveyed 6,000 people who mostly work on computers in the U.S., U.K. and Australia. Some said AI helped them get more done and produce better work. Of those workers, 36% said they hid how much it helped........

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