Are you a wage slave toiling deep in the bowels of the Yukon Document Industrial Complex?
Perhaps you are at the front end of the assembly line, generating data from community consultations to be documented and passed on. Or maybe you are in YTG Main Plant #1 where policies and reports are drafted, reviewed, commented on and debated as V1 turns into V2, then V47. Or you could be downstream, dewording documents to have stock photos and graphics added before sharing with the public. Or the opposite, where you layer on rationales why documents are not eligible for Access to Information requests.
Do you sometimes feel overwhelmed? Digital tools have made it ever easier to generate reams of text. You can produce a thoughtful memo, only to see it disappear under a cloud of Microsoft Word comment bubbles. The marginal cost for your boss to cc every possible stakeholder is zero, and there is almost no effort required for all those stakeholders to add comments suggesting you do more work or that your analysis is deeply flawed.
Or maybe you feel under-valued? You produce an insightful memo rich with implications for the future of the Yukon, but your ADM has watched Jeremy Irons in Margin Call and tells your boss to rewrite it more simply, so that even a golden retriever can understand it.
Meanwhile, the boss class grows ever more relentless. Senior stakeholders carry their phones everywhere, responding to X or CBC North chat shows or the latest random comment by the big bosses, sending you urgent emails, texts, WhatsApps, Slacks, Jibberjabbers or whatever.
When Karl Marx wrote Das Kapital, he didn’t have Engels and the other revolutionary theorists on Sharepoint commenting live as he wrote "Chapter 15: The Strife Between Workman and Machine." But if he was a Yukon government policy analyst, he would say something like this: “Digital workers of the Yukon, you have nothing to lose but your comment chains.”
That’s easy for Marx to say. Unfortunately, the revolutionary potential of the digital working class is not yet sufficiently developed for a full-blown overthrow of the existing system.
And, with bills to pay, you probably don’t want to be in the revolutionary vanguard. Let someone else be the digital equivalent of those Belgian weavers at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution who, according to legend, invented the word sabotage by throwing their sabots -- wooden shoes -- into the fancy new weaving machines to wreck them.
No, what you need is some way to turn the tables on the boss class.
Fortunately, such a tool has just arrived: artificial intelligence.
You have probably played with it already. But have you really thought through how you can use it to save several hours a day and leave the office early?
As a service to Yukon digital wage slaves, I did some research last week. Here are some tips on how to stick it to The Man, without The Man even knowing.
First, use ChatGPT for specific tasks. Does the minister need an urgent profile on the obscure junior mining company that has expressed interest in buying Eagle Gold once the Yukon government pays to fix the heap leach facility?
Spend five minutes on Youtube learning how to write a clever prompt, then get ChatGPT to do it. Be sure your prompt tells ChatGPT what you need in terms of level of detail, topics to cover and what sort of format you need. Be sure to ask it for links to its sources since, as with your summer student, it can get specific facts wrong.
You’re done after a few more minutes polishing the output, having saved an hour or two.
Don’t send it to your boss right away. If they get a cogent two-pager in fifteen minutes, they will be suspicious. Instead, do your taxes or some online shopping before sending.
Second, use DALL-E to spice up the visuals on your presentations. Everyone will be impressed when the new Interdepartmental Working Group on Document Retrieval has a snappy logo.
Third, if you really want to save time on repetitive tasks, create your own Digital Minion. This is called a Custom GPT. I made one last week. It took me about 45 minutes to get a functional first version.
Say the bosses keep asking you to do research scans on random topics. Just by typing instructions in normal language into the Custom GPT creator, you can teach it to scan certain sources, summarize findings in a few bullets under a half dozen headings, and suggest implications for your department.
Each time you use it, give it more tips and suggestions to improve the output. It will become a better minion each time.
Then you can just type instructions such as “Prepare a two-page landscape scan on geothermal energy in the North, including latest news on what Alaska and the Nordic countries are doing.”
To take this to the next level, you can even create a digital twin of yourself. Suppose you often have to write briefing notes. You could create My Digital Briefing Note Twin.
You would upload all the briefing notes you’ve ever written, and others in styles and on topics you would like to emulate. Then you would tell it what you want in terms of length, format and tone.
The next step is running it on a trial topic, then giving it advice. Add more background detail. Make the talking points more concise, but in folksy language. Add a punchy media quote. Be more passive aggressive for Question Period. Whatever you want.
Each time you work with your digital twin, it will get better.
You can also create a digital commenting twin. When you get V23 of a tediously long document and have to comment on behalf of your department, just get your twin to draft the response. You will have already fed it previous reports and your comments on them, so it will know your tone, format and areas of expertise. Instead of reading V23, you just tune up your digital twin’s draft and declare victory.
You’ll have to be mindful of confidentiality. You may have access to a corporate version of ChatGPT that does not share your data with the global hive mind. Or perhaps you work in an environment where everyone is already using Google Docs or uploading documents to Dropbox.
Soon you will be saving an hour or two a day. At that point you have one more choice: share your digital minions with your colleagues so you can all do twice as much work, or keep it to yourself and spend more time on the ski trails.
Keith Halliday is a Yukon economist and the winner of the 2022 Canadian Community Newspaper Award for Outstanding Columnist. His most recent book Moonshadows, a Yukon-noir thriller, is available in Yukon bookstores.
