That A.I.-written email you fired off to save 10 minutes? It may have cost your colleague an hour... and cost you their trust. Today Prof. Jeff Hancock and Dr. Kate Niederhoffer, coiners of the term "workslop", join me to fix its scourge!
More on Jeff:
• Professor of communication at Stanford University and founding director of the Stanford Social Media Lab.
• Was previously a professor at Cornell University.
• Holds a PhD in psychology from Dalhousie University in Canada.
More on Kate:
• Chief Scientist at BetterUp, a workforce coaching platform that combines human professional coaching, behavioral science, and A.I. to support personal growth, leadership, and mental fitness.
• Holds a PhD in psychology from the The University of Texas at Austin.
Together, Kate and Jeff are prolific co-authors of widely-cited articles on workplace productivity in the A.I. era. They publish in both academic journals and commercially-minded publications like the Harvard Business Review. It was their September 2025 HBR article "A.I.-Generated Workslop is Destroying Productivity" that introduced the world to the now widely-used "workslop" term.
In this episode, Kate and Jeff reveal:
• Why over half of workers admit to producing workslop.
• How it can cost a large company tens of millions of dollars a year.
• Their new concept of "relation slipping".
The SuperDataScience podcast is available on all major podcasting platforms, YouTube, and at SuperDataScience.com.
Filtering by Tag: #FutureOfWork
Weapons of Math Destruction, Ten Years On, with Dr. Cathy O’Neil
What makes an algorithm terrifying? My guest today, mega-bestselling author of "Weapons of Math Destruction" Dr. Cathy O'Neil, says it's not the complexity of the math; it's the secrecy, the unaccountability and the fact that you can't opt out.
More on Dr. O'Neil:
• A decade after her "Weapons of Math Destruction" (2016) sounded the alarm on algorithmic harm, she's busier than ever.
• Through her algorithmic-auditing firm ORCAA and her nonprofit OCEAN, she now provides the statistical evidence behind lawsuits against some of the world's biggest tech companies.
• Co-hosts the "A.I. Skeptics" podcast.
• Also wrote "The Shame Machine: Who Profits in the New Age of Humiliation", which was published in 2022 (like WMD, also by Penguin Random House).
• Before writing trade publications, her first book was actually an O'Reilly book, "Doing Data Science".
• Earlier in her career, she held academic positions at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Barnard College before becoming a Wall-Street analyst at The D. E. Shaw Group.
In this episode, Cathy:
• Punctures A.I. hype.
• Explains why A.I. won't so much replace workers as degrade them.
• Lays out how all of us can demand accountability.
I wanted to have this exceptional conversation with Dr. O'Neil for a decade, enjoy!
The SuperDataScience podcast is available on all major podcasting platforms, YouTube, and at SuperDataScience.com.