Competing With Robots Is Making Work Worse
It's said that as work becomes increasingly automated thanks to artificial intelligence, our special human traits — empathy and humor, creativity and kindness — will become only more valuable.
I wonder. What we've seen so far doesn't leave me optimistic.
Instead of embracing what makes us different from machines, we humans often seem to be trying to imitate them. Too many of us skip lunch, eschew breaks and work more feverishly, as if we're just brains attached to rather inefficient, fleshy hardware — the bodies that (irritatingly) get sick, break down and require regular feeding and rest. Or we try to do too many things at once — texting while driving, emailing during meetings — as if we're a laptop that can run multiple programs instead of a human that can focus on only one thing at a time.
Downtime is a flaw in a machine, but a requirement for a human. Nonetheless, there is pressure to work faster, as if speed and quality rise in lockstep. The arrival of chatbots like GPT-4 capable of churning out credible text in seconds further ups the ante on humans.
It's as if John Henry wasn't just trying to outdo a steam-powered drill, but become one. The result is that people and their workplaces have become less patient, less civil. Less human.
But ultimately, trying to imitate machines is a losing battle. “The race for IQ is being lost,” says Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, chief innovation officer at ManpowerGroup and a business psychology professor. “By that I mean all of the things that are stochastic, algorithmic, objectively solvable. We are not going to be able to compete with machines.” What we must do is rehumanize a dehumanized workplace, he argues in his new book I, Human.
Chamorro-Premuzic warns that we must resist the pull of
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