Human beings have always worked and from it obtained meaning, purpose, and a sense of contribution. Work is not the problem, jobs are the problem. The daily grind under the weight of an autocratic system, in service of a boss high on narcissism and low on patience. But maybe that's about to change…maybe.
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Millions of people are at odds with the work they do. This has been demonstrated in study after study. Gallup recently reported that workplace engagement continues to fall, with the global percentage of engaged employees in 2024 falling from 23% the previous year to 21%. In study of directly employed and self-employed people I published with John Hyland in 2021, all groups examined were dissatisfied with their work. In org psychology classes, I ask students to take the Satisfaction With Work Scale (Gagné et al., 2007) and almost no one finds themselves satisfied with their work.
We won't get into the nuances of happiness and satisfaction, but it is sufficient to say, vast numbers of people are working as a means to an end. They do it because they have to, because if they didn't, they would be of no benefit to society. Therefore, I wonder if jobs are a moral imperative as much as they are economic. Even if you find a job in a field you're passionate about, often the workplace itself can drive you to the brink of depression.
I know this only too well from personal experience, and through working with people one-to-one in my private practice. They love their work but their resolve and enthusiasm are chipped away through daily micro-aggressions; passive aggression, little jabs, subtle intimidation, crappy leadership. And so, it is often the extrinsics of the job that cause unhappiness and dissatisfaction with work. In top-down hierarchical systems of work, the relentless pursuit of profit and objective outcomes, organisations are only too willing to sacrifice people. And all of this about to worsen, it seems, with the continual development of AI technologies.
The Ubiquity of Technology
Technology has become ubiquitous in life, and arguably, it already consumes us in both work and broader contexts to the point were our cognitive abilities are negatively affected. We actively use it for things like finding directions, planning our day, ordering a pizza, writing email responses, creating marketing materials, and performing research. It operates passively in the background shaping our thinking, attitudes and beliefs. Our entire sense of self is sculpted by tech, and even more so for younger generations. It appears we have become inseparable from it.
Look at the gulf in proficiency and application of technology between our parents and our children. Some older generations barely grasp how to use a touch screen. In contrast, our children are almost entirely technologically literate right out of the cot. Mobile devices have replaced pacifiers as the parental tool of choice for keeping kids quiet, which worries me. Our world is changing increasingly rapidly, and technology, in the hands of those who pursue power and control, is the driver. Like hand-in-glove, we adopt these new ways of living.
Corporate Dominance, Not Social Benefit
By its very nature, capitalism is competitive – or is it? I'll come back to that question another time. Whatever corporation gets ahead in the AI race will essentially rule the market, and the race is currently full-on. As can be seen with the recent proposals from the EU to water down the AI Act, it’s becoming increasingly likely that governments no longer hold a veto on AI development. In fact, it is doubtful if governments are really for the people at all, such is the infiltration of corporate interests. Regardless, this technology race has an inherent risk.
The approach with technological advancement has always been to roll it out and see what happens…make money, control the market, people are expendable, we can fix things later. But this may not be a wise approach this time, given that we really don’t know what’s inside the AI box. Its creators don’t know how it learns (if that's even the right term) and may be unable to stop it once it gets going. If corporations can function effectively with 20% or 30% less staff, then I believe they will.
“We have a very good idea of sort of roughly what it's doing but we don't actually know what's going on anymore than we know what's going on in your brain. We designed the learning algorithm…but we don't really understand exactly how they do those things.”
Geoffrey Hinton, Godfather of AI
This is in spite of David Graeber's position on the nature of jobs, that is, productive jobs have been largely automated out of existence and most people today do bullshit jobs. In other words, the system operates on a moral and political basis, and has created jobs just to keep people working. As the idea goes, if you are busy making ends meet, even if you dislike your job, you won't have time to think about how you're being royally screwed. “Hell, Graeber wrote, “is a collection of individuals who are spending the bulk of their time working on a task they don’t like and who are not especially good at it.”
And so, some would say otherwise, but I believe that AI presents an opportunity for the average worker to redesign what work is and what it means to them. Instead of a perpetual pursuit of something; a better job, a promotion, status, the company car etc. Instead of waiting on others to give you what you want in life, make it yourself. Technology offers us, as it has always done I believe, the opportunity to break free of bullshit, meaningless jobs, and finally command our own work.
But you've got to be willing to learn how the tech operates, the pros and cons, the benefits and the drawbacks, the positive and negative consequences. Get your hands dirty rather than listening to the hype machine and allowing it highjack your embedded biases. Don't wait for it to hit. Get out ahead of it, know how your work will be impacted and learn the skills you need to succeed.
Knowledge is power, and if you know what your boss doesn't, you're in clover.
The Impact of AI Technologies
Technological complexity operates exponentially, and predicting the outcomes of higher-order complex systems is impossible – it's like weather forecasting. We’re not dealing with simple hydraulic models of reality any longer. For example, building a new contraption one hundred years ago would have brought about a negative but arguably limnited impact on jobs. Take the trade of the Cooper; aluminium kegs, in this case, largely did away with a centuries-old trade, but the negative implications didn’t extend much further than the trade itself. Today’s advancements in technology, however, are likely to have a much broader and more profound effect.
The problem is that powerful organisations are pushing forward, and human cognition and our problem-solving ability are slower than the rate of change. Some voices, like The Future of Life Institute, want to see the development of AI slowed so that we can better prepare for the future. Although the capacity of generative AI is limited at present, some suggest their rate of development poses a significant risk. But I’m not sure that the slow-down will come quickly enough, or even at all, and my position is more pessimistic than optimistic.
That said, human brains are making this technology and very little happens without human input. That doesn't mean that the tech won't drive us, it might. If history has taught us anything it is that we are inherently manipulable beings. There will undoubtedly be benefits to humanity in this AI technological revolution, but the downside might well be harsh and painful for many. Ordinary people and the poorest of those are likely to suffer the most. It has always been this way and it's unlikely to be different this time. If we allow ourselves to be driven by the tech instead of us driving it, people will suffer.
No corner of our world will be left unaffected by AI, and change is already happening. Our local pharmacy, for example, uses a robot to retrieve prescription medicine from the shelves. “Chip” is a bit of a celebrity with local kids regularly visiting the pharmacy to see him in action. That’s one less local person employed. But on the positive side for the organisation, Chip doesn’t need breaks, won’t be out sick, won’t be late for work, and has reduced errors in fulfilling prescriptions to practically zero. That is, until he breaks.
The development of AI, robotics and automation is a natural progression from the division of labour; the splitting of complex productive tasks into several specialised, more straightforward tasks. People like Frederick Taylor and Henry Ford were two of its earliest advocates made famous through Scientific Management and the assembly line. Some experts predict that with continued simplification of complex tasks, automation will lead to increased job loss, decreased income and deepening social inequality. Others believe it will lead to new opportunities and increased innovation and productivity (Langer & Landers, 2021). Whatever the actual outcome, society needs to prepare, and so do you.
In A World With No Work
With no work available, what will millions of people do with their time? How will they earn? How will they live, survive, and even thrive? Our relationship with work used to be vocational, but through Capitalism, it has become transactional and as a consequence in my view, people have become disconnected from its meaning and have become sick. Even so, we derive our sense of worth, value and social contribution from our work; what would millions do without it?
Apart from social enterprises, more often than not, the organisation’s purpose is to serve the interests of the people who own it rather than broader society. Regardless of well-scripted, lofty, and perhaps naive social statements, corporations exist primarily to line the pockets of their shareholders, not to be of social benefit. If it does happen to provide a social benefit, it's not primarily by design. And if the time comes that profits begin to suffer as a consequence of that chance social benefit, that social benefit will be removed. And critically, whether we’d like to admit it or not, everyone who gives their time and effort to that organisation does so at the pleasure of the organisation. You’re just a number.
They care about getting the job done, that’s all. And as we remember the effort, worry, stress, and anxiety we and thousands of others generated in this service, we lament the loss of connection to one another. Sure, we made friends at work, but this was in spite of the conditions rather than because of them. We crave social connection. Without it, we die. Organisations take advantage of this, creating narratives for naive twenty and thirty-somethings to align with.
I'll cite Chomsky in Conclusion…
In 1976, Chomsky said that people who are satisfied with their work live longer, are healthier, and live happier lives. He said that knowing you are doing something useful for your community is crucial for job satisfaction. The feeling that what we are doing is important and that it contributes to the lives of others is a significant factor in our personal satisfaction. That aside, there is the inherent satisfaction and gratification that we receive from doing things that we enjoy. In the modern workplace, this intrinsic value seems to have been reduced to almost nothing, with utility taking priority. In other words, if what we are doing cannot be transformed into profit, it’s hardly worth the effort.
I think our society has come to believe this absolutely, and alongside this is the sense of absence and meaninglessness. Change is taking place at work rapidly, and although corporate adoption of AI is perhaps slower than Google et al would like, there technologies are unlikely to disappear completely. So time to get on on, and learn the AI skills you need for the future workplace.
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