Gil Luria, head of technology research at brokerage D.A. Davidson, said the dynamic concerned him.
“That doesn’t sound very healthy,” Luria told Fortune. “You get the behavior that you create the incentive for. So if you tell people they’ll succeed if they use a resource more, of course they’ll use it more.”
Luria clarified that, for him, there isn’t a question that AI tools are very powerful and have the opportunity to make everyone more productive. But the “hurdle,” so-to-speak, is in diffusion.
“Humans are rigid in how they do things,” Luria said. “So if you don’t create an incentive for humans to change their behavior, try something new, most of us won’t.”
The question is how to incentivize that change without producing gaming, a problem formalized in Goodhart’s Law: “when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.” While Amazon evidently told employees that their “tokenmaxxing” would not be a factor in their performance reviews, multiple employees told the FT that they worried managers watched it anyway. One said there was “so much pressure” to use the tools, and at that, the most.
The dashboard was taken down after The Information’s reporting, but Meta CTO Andrew Boswort has publicly endorsed the underlying logic. He said his best engineer was spending the equivalent of his salary in tokens but, as a result, was “5x to 10x more productive.”
“It’s like, this is easy money,” Bosworth told Forbes. “Keep doing it. No limit.”
Amazon did not immediately respond to Fortune’s request for comment.
