If you look at the contributors to the mental health damage, though, you see things that are avoidable if organizations wanted to avoid them. Fix poor management, address understaffing, pay people what they’re worth, and don’t lay off workers just to tweak the stock price. Unfortunately, in the current political and economic climate, I don’t see enough organizations that want to do any of that.
If you don’t put the guardrails in place, you are inviting someone, or some agent, to go rogue. The only difference is that if this were a contractor or an IT person with higher-than-should-be access, you could fall back on their ethics. AI doesn’t have ethics and doesn’t understand the concept. If it can do it, it will do it.
Who’s making sure that what it can do is appropriately limited?
Maybe we can solve both of those issues this way? We’ll bill you fewer attorney hours by leveraging AI, but you need to foot the bill for its use? Right now, with a set price per seat, the cost of using AI on a given matter is nothing, but it won’t remain that way. It can’t.
Will the legal market make this adjustment to billing back the cost of AI compute? If not, how do firms justify the undefined cost for your firm?
Employees dealing with trauma outside of work often carry that trauma with them into work, and we need resources to help them navigate that. What do we offer people experiencing trauma at work who carry that trauma into the rest of their lives?
Maybe the better question is, what do we owe them?
I’m cherry-picking the Microsoft note, but the same is true of every AI company out there. Unlimited Copilot interactions cost much, much more than $30 per month in compute costs. Someday, Microsoft and all the other companies will have to change their entire model to show any profit.
While there may be growth opportunities in blue-collar industries, you don’t suddenly become a plumber or electrician. It’s a long learning process that doesn’t scale well for that many unemployed people. This is reskilling at a massive, rapid scale, but we have to admit that whatever reskilling we’ve done in the past hasn’t been that good.
Do we expect what we’ve done before to ever match current and future needs? I don’t think it will, and that’s a problem that should be addressed. We need different, serious ideas, but I don’t see many of them out there.