AI and individual differences at work

AI and neurodiversity

Every time I give a talk or presentation which covers reasons why we may not want to use AI in the workplace, or in our personal lives for that matter, someone in the audience talks about how AI tools have enabled them to overcome barriers they experience in their professional lives due to their own neurodivergence.

There are two points I normally make in response to this. The first is that the existence of a tool which enables some people to overcome barriers that they face does not justify the use of that tool as a shortcut by people who face no such barriers. The second is about the origin and significance of those barriers. Take spelling for example. Standardized spelling is a relatively late introduction into written language, coming sometime, if I remember correctly, in the eighteenth century. Famously, Shakespeare himself spelt his own name several different ways. Now, in the twenty first century, we are in a situation where spelling mistakes, or perhaps we should say spelling diversity, is seen as highly unprofessional. However, very few spelling mistakes change the meaning or create ambiguity, and almost all can be easily corrected in the mind of the reader with little or no effort: correct spelling is largely unimportant in natural languages. Yet those whose neurodivergence makes correct spelling, or more often spotting spelling mistakes, challenging feel under immense pressure to put in extra effort to meet these standards.

Who are these gatekeepers, and by what right do they create these barriers for others? Of course, in many professional contexts these expectations are set by the client and it is in fact the client who needs to undergo the process of reflection about why this is so important to them. What we need to avoid is the reflexive use of AI to meet these expectations thereby masking their unreasonableness or arbitrariness. It is possible to both empower the neurodivergent to use the tools while challenging the expectations themselves.

Every worker is different in some way or other

There is, however, an even deeper issue in how we are organizing the workplace and our professional norms. The focus on neurodiversity, and in particular clinically recognized categories of neurodivergence, makes this seem like an EDI issue rather than an issue of universal human variation and individual difference.

Take, for example, the way that the contemporary working environment revolves around the digital calendar. Until surprisingly recently, and I will come to that turning point in a moment, digital calendars were a personal choice which sat alongside desk diaries, pocket diaries, Filofaxes and other forms of time management. Employers and other custodians of professional standards recognized that different people have different ways of managing the crucial information to organize their own time effectively. Just as there are different learning styles, there are different functional styles. While employers might have provided staff with desks, diaries, or wall calendars, it was recognised that there was no one right way to manage this information and represent it to the person who needed it. At some stage in one's education, perhaps in the sixth form, perhaps as an undergraduate, one discovered what worked best for oneself and developed habits and techniques around that to ensure that time was managed effectively and one was able to function in the workplace. That this was individual, that people differed, was never questioned. Personally, I started using a digital calendar as my personal and work diary more than twenty years ago when I first got a Palm Pilot, which synchronized with a desktop calendar. This worked for me but I was well aware that it wouldn't work for many other people.

The pandemic changed all this in two, well, two and a half ways. The first was remote working: it was no longer possible to just ask a colleague in the same office if they were free next Tuesday afternoon to meet with so-and-so. Similarly, with people working from home rather than in a formal office environment, interrupting them with a phone call became less and less common because people flexed their hours around their domestic life rather than a rigid nine to five at work. The second was the simultaneous and unavoidable move to video meetings. In particular, what had previously been conversations between colleagues became semi-formalized as meetings with the associated implication that they needed to be scheduled. The half is the interesting sociological fact that despite video conferencing tools having mechanisms which allowed direct calling of individuals, most people defaulted to creating ad hoc meetings as shared calendar entries with video conferencing links.

Remote and asynchronous coordination of diaries over long, and often difficult to follow ,email trails led to many mistakes. Some quickly, some rather more slowly, but eventually everyone switched to online calendars, with at least free busy information shared. Now, six years on, we are in a situation where using and sharing online calendars in the workplace has become normative. Those who resist or do it ineffectively are often subject to quite significant criticism and censure.

For some, the difference between a desk diary, a Filofax, and a digital calendar may seem trivial or unimportant since all represent the same information.¹ But for others, the professional norm of digital calendars is forcing them to function in one way rather than another, and a way that may be unnatural or, for them, less effective. Centuries of respect for individual difference in this matter has been discarded without even any awareness, let alone reflection. 'Move fast and break things' strikes again.

Work tools and technologies

Digital calendars are one of the more obvious forms of standardization in the workplace. For reasons ranging from legal compliance to cyber security to corporate branding, organizations have adopted and enforced more and more standardized workplace tools, primarily digital but also in many cases physical. Most will allow exceptions for formal EDI related reasons, often backed by 'evidence', but the general principle is that personal preferences have no relevance to worker functioning. The everyday choices of workers in the pre-digital age between, say, a fountain pen and a ballpoint, between a notebook and an A4 pad, between a lever arch file and a box file are seen as merely matters of taste.

However, some relics of the idea that the tools and technologies you choose may affect your functioning in the workplace in highly individual ways still persist. For example, Sam Altman famously takes notes by hand in a notebook and, by all accounts, has a distinctive personal system for how those notes are taken, stored and managed. Here we see a powerful person with access to the most sophisticated digital technologies on the planet, preferring to use what is in essence a medieval system of commonplace books.

Altman is the poster boy for all the reasons to resist excessive standardization of workplace tools and technologies. Of course, some things have to be standardized, but we also need to fully understand the correct boundary to place around what is suitable for corporate standardization and what should be a matter of the individual finding what works for them best, what is their personal functional style.

AI tools for personal functional differences

This is particularly important for AI tools and technologies. An AI tool which helps overcome barriers faced by neurodivergent employees falls clearly within the scope of personal choice in order to adapt to the individual functional style. But an AI tool producing content, be that code, text, images, videos, to be incorporated in a product that the organization is working on, is equally clearly not a matter of personal choice.

However, the individual differences which might factor in to one person's choice to use or not to use a specific AI tool because it fits better with their personal functional style are many and varied. Some people may be willing and more importantly able to complicate their lives in order to reduce the environmental impact of their choices. Others may be juggling health conditions, caring responsibilities or other personal challenges in ways which justify their personal choice to take advantage of some technology which others may eschew. Some may care more about privacy or politics than others. Some may have job security, which allows them to take a thoughtful and considered approach. Others may have insecurity or be under unreasonable pressure, which justifies them taking advantage of every opportunity possible to increase their functioning in the workplace.²

We should be cautious in judgment about people's personal choices because we may not know about, let alone be able to take into account, these factors which may justify them. What is important is that the choices are made consciously and that the individual takes responsibility for them.

Choices of corporate tools are a different matter and need to be publicly evaluated and, where appropriate, criticized.