TThe other day, as I pulled into a client’s office parking lot, a woman was sitting in her car next to me, blasting music. She caught me looking and rolled down the window and said, “I’m going to go into the house right now…just enjoy my last moments of freedom!”
Is this the way we want to live? No, it’s not.
Elon Musk recently predicted that work will become voluntary. “It’s going to be like playing sports or video games or whatever,” he said. That’s nice.
We may be at the beginning of a change that humanity has never seen before. The main reason for this is that it changes very quickly. It is clear that millions, perhaps hundreds of millions of jobs will be replaced by AI in just a few years. According to Musk, “Anything digital, whoever is sitting at the computer and creating a file, that’s the first thing they do.”
People are afraid of losing their jobs. But should you?
Let’s assume that AI actually has the effects that people like Mr. Musk predict. Millions of jobs are being replaced by agents. Countless office workers are upset by bots that take orders, reconcile accounts, send emails, reply to messages, request cash receipts, create proposals, create invoices, and do all the other tasks office workers have been doing for more than a century.
Let’s also assume that another of Musk’s predictions comes true. The wealth generated by AI will create some kind of universal income. According to Musk and others, companies will become so productive and profitable that governments will simply tax a larger portion of corporate profits and redistribute those taxes to the people. Leaving aside the real human ability to undermine such concepts and turn fair systems into unfair ones, there is an assumption that most people earn enough to buy both necessities and luxuries without having to work. Again, you don’t have to work.
There’s no need to wake up early and take public transportation to work. You don’t have to sit in front of a monitor for 10 hours a day, interact with coworkers, or be under intense scrutiny from your boss. No uncomfortable clothes, pointless meetings, Teams calls, or performance reviews. No office politics, no fluorescent lights, no loss of privacy, noisy co-workers, no “reply all” emails, no smelly refrigerators, no smelly toilets. No more “great retirements,” “last-minute Mondays,” “coffee badges,” or “quiet retirements.”
Isn’t this what we want? Watch movies and TV shows where people work. Severance, The Office, Glengarry Glen Ross, The Apartment, Joe Versus the Volcano, and The Devil Wears Prada. Are workers portrayed as happy or unhappy? Satisfied or stressed? Or are they portrayed as miserable, boring, reckless robots who punch and punch in order to receive a meager salary in order to enjoy a purposeless, fruitless, miserable life?
The human species was never created to work in an office. If you ask a retired person if they wanted to go back to work, most people will look at you like you’re crazy. A person on his deathbed never says he regrets not spending more time working. We like to read, play, watch TV, nap, hunt, ski, and spend time with our families. It would be unnatural to replace these very human activities with sitting in a cubicle all day reading reports.
I think people who think that being in the office is the meaning of life can also accept that in the world of AI. We humans are good at filling the time until we die. In 1913, the original IRS tax code was 400 pages. Currently, there are over 75,000. We are constantly creating work for ourselves.
But perhaps AI will change the way we perceive life. Perhaps when technology is doing everything humans are doing, those same humans can step back and find another purpose for their existence. Rather than fearing the future, it may make more sense to embrace it. Thanks to AI, humans may finally have the opportunity to let machines do away with all the senseless, stupid, and insane things we’ve been doing in the office. We can only hope that humans don’t waste that opportunity.
