Great Workplace Conversation can’t say enough about our basic instincts. Objectively speaking, we are still relatively highly evolved, communal and intelligent primates. So we are driven by what we want to acknowledge: love, empathy, and the golden rule. But there are things we don’t like to admit all the same – status, jealousy, and self-interest.
These two aspects of our nature are often intertwined. Show empathy to elevate your standing among your peers. And often attributing to others noble motives rooted in something despicable. As La Rochefoucal wrote:
“Great and brilliant deeds that fascinate the bystanders are painted by strategists as the result of great plans, but are usually the result of temperament and passion. Thus the war between Augustus and Antony is the result of the domination of the world.” It may have been due to their ambition to do so, or simply out of jealousy.”
At some point in all talks about hybrid working, this sort of thing needs to be covered. It doesn’t just acknowledge the outrage of the majority of people talking about 4 days a week, 4 days a week, 4 days a week, hybrid working. Anything irrelevant.
Status is perhaps the most important of the dubious motives of human behavior. It’s possible to view your status remotely, but I think you’re trying to discover new ways to clarify where you stand in the pecking order.
Just as executives got more creative when it became clear that mahogany desks, high-backed leather chairs, and private offices were likely to be interpreted as signs of inadequacy (often If there is a good reason for it), you will also see the emergence of new status symbols. new way of working.
great eye
One of the ways this can happen is by being one of those people who have awakened from that sleep unmonitored by the great eye of surveillance and productivity measurement.
Personality tests are back on the menu.
As this article in The New York Times reveals, Myers-Briggs may not be rehabilitated, but knowing how to manage them will be difficult as companies are looking at new ways of classifying people. can.
“Today, as management grapples with costly decisions about whether to require in-person office work or to reserve office space, there is pressure on companies to collect these perspectives on their employees. At the very least, personality tests can give companies a vocabulary of how their employees like to socialize—whether they crave banter at the water cooler or dread holiday parties. .”
And sometimes surveys, tests, and interviews aren’t enough. We are already being asked to consider how we respond to companies feeding live feeds into our minds as part of their neural interfaces. One legal expert has already suggested that we might want to consider establishing the concept of cognitive freedom in law to anticipate such technology. , which could come true anytime soon.
AI Karamba
Speaking of which, hot topics about AI keep pouring in, some of which may be useful or at least informative.
One of them is this article from The Conversation, which explains how one of the problems we have in dealing with the changes AI brings is how we anthropomorphize technology. We should not attribute to it the abilities and characteristics that are mainly in our own heads.
“Popular culture has inspired people to think of dystopias in which artificial intelligence throws off the shackles of human dominance and runs its own life, much like the AI-powered cyborgs did in Terminator 2.
“The late entrepreneur Elon Musk and physicist Stephen Hawking, who died in 2018, further stoked these fears by describing the rise of artificial intelligence as one of the greatest threats to the future of humanity. .
“However, these concerns are unfounded, at least as far as large-scale language models are concerned. ChatGPT and similar technologies are sophisticated text-completion applications, nothing more, nothing less. , is a function of how predictable humans are, given enough data about how we communicate.”
The same call not to be tricked into thinking AI isn’t what it is is repeated here by James Bridle. this twitter thread William Eden also highlights other constraints on AI and the expansion of its computing power, such as lack of hardware availability and profitability.
We also need to keep an eye on our thirst for energy as we need all our technology. As this article from Bloomberg suggests, we need to know soon how much resources this stuff will consume. it won’t work.
Mark is the publisher of Workplace Insight, IN Magazine, Works Magazine and European Director of Work&Place Journal. He has worked as a journalist, marketing expert, editor, and consultant in office design and management departments for over 30 years.
