Think of These Questions for the Future of Work

The Right Questions to Ask about Our Work in the Age of AI

In the recent episode of “On with Kara Swisher”, the host Kara Swisher talked about How AI will impact the future of work with a futurist Martin Ford and labor economist Betsey Stevenson.

• Martin Ford, known for his book Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future, raised the possibility of significant disruption in employment as robotics and AI move into roles historically held by humans.

• Betsey Stevenson, an economist, provided a perspective grounded in labor-economics and policy: the effects will vary by occupation, by skill level, and by how quickly adaptation happens.

Despite differences in their views and where they come from, they shared some similar observations in the conversation as follows:

• The transition people experience with their work will not be uniform to everyone: some roles may be transformed or made more productive rather than eliminated outright. However, whether it’s a blue-collar job or knowledge work, any roles involving routine physical or repetitive “algorithmic tasks” (data processing, pattern recognition, documenting, etc.) may face increased automation and replacement via robotics and AI.

• If work is transformed, policy will need to adapt accordingly to support people and society. For example: support for displaced workers, retraining/reskilling programs, and possibly more radical ideas like a universal basic income (UBI) or digital dividends.

• Education and lifelong learning become vital: as tasks shift, the nature of skills valued will shift. Human skills will matter more, but what they are will shift: Skills like empathy, oversight, judgment, creativity, liaising between machines and humans may become relatively more important; routine execution perhaps less so.

This conversation prompted me to think about what are the right questions to contemplate with regard to our work in the age of AI.

The Right Questions to Ask

1. “Will I lose my job?” (X) => “How will my job change?” (O)

Most frequently asked questions about our work with the advent of AI are “Which jobs will AI and robotics replace humans?” or “Will I lose my job?”. But the right question to ask is “How will my job change?”

Surely, some jobs will be replaced by AI and robotics outright. I don’t deny that. As both Ford and Stevenson mentioned above, humans will most likely lose many jobs centered around algorithmic tasks, as they will be replaced by AI and robotics. Yet, it doesn’t mean AI and robotics will replace 100% of every jobs humans do.

For many people, the immediate question isn’t just elimination of their role, but transformation of the role: more oversight of AI, more human judgement, and more collaboration with machines. Therefore, the right question to ask is “How will my job change in the context of AI and robotics?” and contemplate how to adapt to such changes.

2. What does “work” mean?

Beyond just jobs and tasks, what does it mean to “go to work” in a world where much can be automated? What do you define as “work?” On any given work day in your job, what do you do? When I look back on my 20 years of career, I spent most of the time in meetings (if not commuting). Is that work? If not, what can we call “work”?

One way to contemplate this question is to reflect how much of your work is composed of pseudowork. In the book, <Pseudowork: How We Ended Up Being Busy Doing Nothing>, coauthors Dennis Nørmark and Anders Fogh Jensen, define “pseudowork” as follows:

Pseudowork is meaningless, bears no significant fruit and has no real impact, no matter whether the person doing it thinks so or not. Empty work is pseudowork. Slacking is intentional pseudowork. But the concept also covers making up things to do that aren’t necessarily instances of deliberate work avoidance, nor absolutely devoid of content, but are nonetheless pseudo, because they ultimately don’t matter. It is work that affects nobody else, or at least nobody who is engaged in real work. Without it, the world will go on undeterred, as if nothing had happened.

Pseudowork is the meeting at which you’re told lots of stuff you already know. It’s the PowerPoint presentation that you forget as soon as the projector is turned off. It’s supervision or monitoring that doesn’t prevent things from going off the rails.

Pseudowork isn’t just empty work. It also refers to bullshit jobs, pretending to be busy, activities that resemble work (but are not), and meaningless tasks, i.e. the big project that everybody knows is a waste of time.

Doing pseudowork has a serious implications on the well-being of workers. The authors discovered the disengagement from the lack of meaning at work became a widespread cause of serious health issues. “In Sweden, the number of people suffering stress has exploded, just as it has in Denmark and the rest of Europe; almost 10 percent of the population are on some kind of antidepressant.” Roland Paulsen, the sociologist well known for his research on empty work, corroborates this. “Work that is so relentlessly meaningless definitely contributes to a lack of mental well-being. People ask themselves: Is this really how I want to spend my time?”

Raise your hand if this question, “Is this really how I want to spend my time?”, never sneaked in your mind. Probably very few. In a way, one clearly positive impact that AI and automation will make to humans is that we’ll become free from many pseudowork jobs. But that’s the half of the story. We will want to spend our time working on a “real” work, something valuable and meaningful for life of ours and others, when we don’t have to do pseudowork anymore. We’ll want to find or even create the “real” work.

This pursuit for a “real” work begs us to ask the next question.

3. Fundamentally, what makes “work” meaningful to me?

What would make your work meaningful to you? More money or higher social status? Okay, but why does that matter? What makes a work meaningful after you accumulate more wealth and fancier status?

You might care deeply about helping stray dogs in India to survive, because you care about the livelihoods of animals. You might find it meaningful to write and talk about the modern day mystics across all religious traditions because you appreciate their wisdom in the universal messages they deliver to people. Or you want to dedicate as much your time as possible to making beautiful ceramics, because you feel so blissful whenever you put your hands on clays. Whatever it is, what makes work meaningful to you is very personal. It’s not contingent on what others value.

So, where do these questions bring us?

Be More Human to Create Your Real Work

There are a lot of fear-mongering narratives in terms of the future of work in the age of AI. But the more I listen to such arguments, debates, or discussions, I come down to the same conclusions over and over, which are:

1. Don’t be afraid, and

2. Try to be more human, not a better version of AI.

The second point, “be more human,” seems ironic or counterintuitive in the age of AI. But what it promises is that we come to create the real work that’s truly meaningful to us by delving into who we are.

That’s what The Placeholder is for. Studying yourself like an anthropologist doing a longitudinal research on certain species of human (in this case, it’s you researching yourself); ideating like a designer, generating out of the box ideas you never tried; and experimenting them like a mad scientist. Doing this on repeat, you come to create the work that you feel aligned with. That’s what the “real” work is.

By learning what it means to be more human and be more like YOU with your own lived experiences, you come to create the meaningful work, the real work for yourself. Instead of living in fear of when some new technologies like AI or robotics will take your job away, you will have agency for your own work to adapt and regenerate, no matter what happens.

Last but not least, going through the Placeholder myself and observing what other people experience in their own Placeholders, I come to truly appreciate the unique human capabilities and qualities that are innate to us but are hard to codify into AI. They are our own intuition, imagination, emotions, and commonsense—called “Primal Intelligence”, according to Angus Fletcher, the professor at Ohio State University. In his book, he shares a method for activating our brain’s primal power to create many possibilities that work. He writes,

With that method, you can adapt to change and win in chaos. You can create the future by seeing the possible faster. You can carry on the mission when the unexpected bullet comes.

An Invitation

So, here’s the prompt I’d like to leave you with:

Contemplate the following three questions. Have conversations about this with your friend, or maybe write a journal about these.

1. How will my job change?

2. What does “work” mean?

3. Fundamentally, what makes “work” meaningful to me?

Then observe what kind of “urges” or “aspirations” spring up in your mind. Perhaps it comes up in the form of “I want to do XYZ” or a certain feeling/emotion. What are they?

If you feel like it, share with me either via comment to this post or send me an email! 😉

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Books📚 | Conversations🎙️That Influenced This Post:

• [Listen] On with Kara Swisher: How AI will impact the future of work

• [Read] Pseudowork: How We Ended Up Being Busy Doing Nothing by Dennis Nørmark and Anders Fogh Jensen

• [Read] Primal Intelligence by Angus Fletcher

• [Read] The Placeholder: The Place To Go To Create Your Noble Work by Miroo Kim