The other day I pulled into the parking lot of a client’s offices and in the spot next to me was a woman sitting in her car blasting music. She caught me looking and rolled down her window and said, “I’ll be inside in a minute … Just enjoying my last few moments of freedom!”
Is this way we want to live? No, it’s not.
Elon Musk recently predicted work will be optional. “It’ll be like playing sports or a video game or something like that,” he said. Sounds nice.
We may well be at the beginning of a change never before seen by humans, mainly because it will be so fast. In just a few short years, it’s clear that AI will be replacing millions, maybe hundreds of millions, of jobs. According to Musk, “Anything digital, anyone sitting at a computer producing files, that’s what goes first.”
People are terrified about losing their jobs. But should we be?
Let’s assume that AI does have the effect that some like Musk are predicting. Millions of jobs are replaced by agents. Countless office workers are upended by bots placing orders, reconciling accounts, sending out emails, replying to messages, applying cash receipts, writing proposals, creating invoices and doing all the other things that office workers have been doing for more than century.
Let’s also assume that Musk’s other prediction comes true: because of the abundance created by AI, there will be some type of universal income. According to Musk, and others, companies will be so productive and so profitable, governments will simply tax a greater share of corporate earnings and then redistribute those taxes back to the people. Putting aside the very real human ability to screw up such a concept and turn any fair system into an unfair one, the assumption is that most people will have enough income to afford both necessities and luxuries without having to work. Let me repeat: without having to work.
No getting up early and commuting on public transit. No sitting in front of a monitor for 10 hours a day or dealing with co-workers or being scrutinized by your boss. No uncomfortable clothing, pointless meetings, Teams calls, performance evaluations. No office politics, fluorescent lighting, loss of privacy, noisy co-workers, “reply all” emails, stinky refrigerators and smelly toilets. No more “great resignation”, “barely minimum Mondays”, “coffee badging” or “quiet quitting”.
Isn’t this what we want? Look at any movie or TV show where people are going to work – Severance, The Office, Glengarry Glen Ross, The Apartment, Joe Versus the Volcano, The Devil Wears Prada. Are workers portrayed as happy or miserable? Satisfied or stressed? Or are they shown as miserable, bored, feckless robots punching in and punching out in order to receive their meager paycheck in order to enjoy their aimless, fruitless, miserable lives?
The human species was never created to work in an office. Ask anyone who’s retired if they wish they were back at work and most would look at you like you’re crazy. People on their deathbeds never say they regret not spending more time at work. We like to read, play, watch TV, nap, hunt, ski, be with our families. It’s not natural to replace these very human activities with sitting in a cubicle reading reports all day.
For those who think that the meaning of life is being in an office, I’m sure that, even in a world of AI, this can be accommodated. We humans are great at filling up the hours until we die. In 1913, the original IRS tax code was 400 pages. Today it’s more than 75,000. We are always making work for ourselves.
But maybe AI will change the way we perceive of our lives. Maybe when technology is doing all of the crap things humans do, those same humans can step back and find other purposes in their existence. Instead of being afraid of the future, maybe it makes more sense to embrace it. Thanks to AI, humans may finally get the chance to let the machines relieve of us all the mindless, stupid, inane things we’ve been doing in our office. We just have to hope that humans don’t blow the opportunity.
