# Infinite Sifting By:: [[Ross Jackson]] 2023-11-06 Imagine grabbing a dictionary, starting with “a,” and reading page by page looking for a helpful word. Or grabbing an encyclopedia and going through volume by volume until one finds something. If one starts the search with nothing in mind other than there must be something in here that will turn out to be important, the search has little context. Now imagine that every day, the length of the dictionary or set of encyclopedias expands. This metaphor might be what AI comes to be organizationally. Infinitely sifting through an ever-increasing amount of information might not be very productive. Of course, there are situations in which AI could be beneficial, but it isn’t clear, at least not yet, that organizations will be one of those situations. Organizations are human creations that exist for human aims. They are social constructions. There isn’t an objective reason for their existence, and there isn’t an inherent objective that “should” be maximized (or minimized). Rather, organizations are inherently subjective. What they do and how they do it reflects a shared (at least tacitly) agreement of ends and means. AI likely pushes us further away from this. As more information is produced, humans will spend eternity sifting infinitely through all that has been generated, more distracted than ever from the real task at hand, which is to define in solidarity with each other what are the jobs worthy of our collective engagement. #### Related Items [[Dictionary]] [[Encyclopedia]] [[Artificial Intelligence]] [[Organization]] [[Distractions]] [[Information]] [[Solidarity]]