Frosty greetings from Stockholm! Here’s what I’ve got for you today:

#1 Configuration Work: Four Consequences of LLMs-in-use, by Gabriel Alcaras and Donato Ricci is worth checking out: “This article examines what it means to use Large Language Models in everyday work. Drawing on a seven-month longitudinal qualitative study, we argue that LLMs do not straightforwardly automate or augment tasks. We propose the concept of configuration work to describe the labor through which workers make a generic system usable for a specific professional task. Configuration work materializes in four intertwined consequences. First, workers must discretize their activity, breaking it into units that the system can process. Second, operating the system generates cluttering, as prompting, evaluating, and correcting responses add scattered layers of work that get in the way of existing routines. Third, users gradually attune their practices and expectations to the machine's generic rigidity, making sense of the system's limits and finding space for it within their practices. Fourth, as LLMs absorb repetitive tasks, they desaturate the texture of work, shifting activity toward logistical manipulation of outputs and away from forms of engagement that sustain a sense of accomplishment. Taken together, these consequences suggest that LLMs reshape work through the individualized labor required to configure a universal, task-agnostic system within situated professional ecologies."

#2 I finally made it into the Swedish parliament house, for an event on AI’s potential role in the upcoming elections. Here’s a short write-up: Here’s AI in the Swedish Election Campaign – Democracy on New Terms. This also inspired me to join RIFO, an association for members of parliament and researchers.

#3 One nice thing about family is that our home features books I would not have chosen myself. Recently, I’ve been reading through W. Timothy Gallwey’s classic The Inner Game of Tennis: The Classic Guide to the Mental Side of Peak Performance. The core argument about letting things work out resonates.

#4 This is the last regular edition of Petit Fours for a while, since I’m about to go on parental leave. I may write every now and then while out of office, but by default, regular services will resume in the autumn, or perhaps first in early 2027.

-A