AI is Coming for Our Jobs
2023 was the year that artificial intelligence (AI) went mainstream. So chances are, even your mother has an opinion about the emerging technology (as outlandish or off-base as it might be).
At the center of the AI discourse are jobs specifically, how AI will impact the workforce and potentially take away jobs.
Embrace Change
As is typical human behavior, there’s a lot of resistance to change and fear-mongering taking place.
While it can be debated what will happen to our jobs as new technology continues to emerge, for the sake of this discussion let’s assume AI will fulfill tasks with little or no human intervention, in turn resulting in less work needing to be done.
We should embrace this change!
After all, why should we be clinging to an economic legacy few of us are happy with and that consists of being overworked, burned out and constantly stressed?
Let AI shoulder this burden for us while we rethink the construction of our society.
The History of Work
Before we continue looking forward, let’s first take a step back and look at why we currently work the way we do.
“The eight-hour workday harkens back to 19th-century socialism. When there was no upper limit to the hours that organizations could demand of factory workers, and the Industrial Revolution saw children as young as six years old working the coal mines, American labor unions fought hard to instill a 40-hour workweek, eventually ratifying it as part of the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938.”
- Steve Glaveski, The Harvard Business Review
While the ratification of this act was a huge success back then, it’s a nightmare that we’re still using these same principles more than 80 years later.
We’re structuring our work around a concept implemented during Henry Ford and the Assembly Line!!!!! This is insane! The world and the technologies within it have gone through a cataclysmic evolution, yet we have not significantly changed our approach to work.
With all the efficiency gains that have come about thanks to technology, we’re collectively working way more than we have to on tasks that are a waste of human ingenuity all to prop up a societal structure that shouldn’t even exist anymore.
A More Fulfilling Future
If our only question around AI is what happens to our existing jobs, then we’re not asking enough of the right questions. We should be challenging the very constructs of our society.
Why do we still deem it necessary (generally speaking) to work eight (or more) hours a week for five days a week? What if the idea of full-time work was something considerably less?
What if we cut out all the redundancy and mundane tasks from our work and let AI handle them for us, so we could spend our time using our brains thinking about the big picture and doing more meaningful tasks?
To be completely honest far more jobs exist in our economy than are necessary because we simply have to prop up our current societal structure built around what we define as full-time work. There are far more working hours needing to be filled than there are meaningful tasks to be done that require the human mind.
This is reflected in the cyclic nature of the economy. Companies are constantly going through hiring cycles followed by rounds of layoffs to reduce the redundant work they hired for.
We’re now also experiencing this from the employee side. There is a great resource crunch (which the aviation industry is experiencing first-hand), because people are realizing (partly thanks to the upheaval that occurred during Covid) that there is more to life than soul-crushing, rigorously structured jobs.
To sum it up: we should collectively be working less, but driving greater impact and overall be living more balanced and more meaningful lives.
We should be thanking AI, not fearing it because it’s the great catalyst for positive change to our society as long as we have the foresight to challenge our outdated structures instead of continuing to force ourselves into a system that no longer makes sense.