A human’s productivity is typically determined, to a large extent, by intelligence and conscientiousness. These are both heritable traits so there is a limit to how smart and conscientious a person is likely to become if his/her/zir/their biological parents weren’t smart and conscientious.
As we celebrate National Coffee Day today, I’m wondering if the conscientious aspect of productivity will be rendered more or less relevant by artificial intelligence and robotics. Consider a person prone to disorganization and procrastination, both behaviors negatively correlated with conscientiousness. Suppose that each of us is being followed everywhere by a humanoid robot. At any given moment, the robot reminds us what needs to be done. Even the spaciest among us will never space out and miss a videoconference because the robot will log us into it.
The flip side of this argument is that AI is a productivity amplifier and, therefore, the people who are currently unproductive will stay unproductive (100 times 0 is still 0) while the productive will become superheroes of output. Maybe a person with mediocre conscientiousness will be rendered more conscientious by the companion robot, but that person will still be left in the dust by the conscientious who’ve gotten even more of a boost from their companion robots.
Related:
- “Heritability of the big five personality dimensions and their facets: a twin study” (classic 1996 paper finding 44% heritability for conscientiousness)
- Wokipedia forced to admit that we’re not all born equal when it comes to IQ (but remember that in the Wokipedia world there is no correlation between race and IQ, only “high heritability of intelligence within races”)
- average IQ in the US is declining (coinciding with soaring immigration from societies with low average IQ), thus making conscientiousness more important: academic paper (2023) from Intelligence (“A reverse Flynn effect was found for composite ability scores with large US adult sample from 2006 to 2018 and 2011 to 2018. Domain scores of matrix reasoning, letter and number series, verbal reasoning showed evidence of declining scores.”)
That sounds as ridiculous as requiring a humanoid robot to sit in a cockpit because the FAA won’t allow connecting a wire. Now we need human robots because the FAA won’t allow any software on our phones.
> As we celebrate National Coffee Day
Some of us are celebrating more than others:
https://news.dunkindonuts.com/news/kahlua-dunkin-2025
I (and elephants) like Amarula Cream better: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amarula
“It’s 4 AM somewhere!”