You still have people performing tasks in exchange for a paycheck. They have no reason to feel like they matter. They’re ultimately replaceable. You remind them of that in a million little ways, then expect them to feel dedicated to the work your company does. That makes no sense.
Years from now, is anyone going to remember that thing you tied yourself into a pretzel to complete while 30,000 feet in the air? It’s unlikely. But your body and brain will be affected by the rest you didn’t get.
The goal of life is not to spend every minute being productive. There’s so much more than that.
For lawyers and other professionals, billing hours is indeed a dumb approach. It hasn’t made sense in years. If AI finally pushes that out of our way, we’ll owe it thanks for that alone. I don’t think AI is good enough to do work on its own, though, so the question then becomes, what are we billing for? Where’s the work? Do you have solid baselines for how much value AI brings versus how much a human is having to contribute to make up for times when the AI falls short, and who decides that?
Then, when the labor market pendulum swings back the other way and there aren’t enough qualified workers to fill the jobs that it turns out AI can’t do, these same workplaces will come out talking about how they’ve always supported worker mental health, they even have an EAP hotline for workers!
Could you not buy it for a second? If they aren’t doing it now, they don’t care. If they don’t care, you owe them nothing more than what your wages buy them. This is what young people in the workplace understand, and many of us who have been around are starting to see as well. We owe them nothing more than what they pay for. The rest of our lives belong to us.
It’s the classic conundrum for workers. If you’re the most productive member of your team, what’s your reward?
More work.
If you’re the most productive member of your team using AI, what’s your reward?
More work, while being more isolated, to work with the AI.
Perhaps we should include a bullet point or two in our business continuity plans for addressing AI outages. Of course, we might also consider the continuity plan for AI tools, or any SAAS solution, going under as well. It’s just good risk management.
How much of your AI work would be negatively impacted by even a few hours of downtime?