I wake up in the morning and the first thing I do is grab my iPhone. I see a wave of notifications from a group chat between my colleagues, emails I received, and various apps that all immediately want my attention. I press and hold the side button on my phone and say “is there any of this that needs my attention immediately”? Siri digs through the conversations and surfaces questions that someone asked the group or me directly that I need to respond to. They want to know about my schedule. I hold the side button and tell Siri to look at my schedule and answer their question. It digs through my files and finds a PDF document with my recent schedule on it. It finds the places where our free times align. It types up a basic message saying “here are some times that we could meet…” and I hit send. I lock my phone and bury my head back in the pillow to grab a few more minutes of sleep. 

What Siri just did was incredible…but was it too much? Does forcing myself to do social labor make me a better person in the long run? 

Technology Changed Labor and Work Boundaries Over The Years

In modern times, what it means to be a “contributing member of society” has changed. At one point, that meant contributing manual labor to help manufacturing in the community. In this era, you clock in, work your butt off, clock out, and go home. You cannot manufacturer cars at home. There is very little you can do at home that is beneficial to work, so workers tend to leave you alone while you’re not there. Besides, how are they going to get ahold of you? Call you on the phone? That takes time and effort. Work stays at work. 

As technology evolved, so too did the workforce. Laptops could handle your work email, your work software, and all your files. That laptop could be taken with you a lot of places and popped up to work. Manufacturing jobs are leaving the US and now we are doing more jobs that can be completed on the computer. We communicate with colleagues via email and use software to do job tasks. That said, laptops are chunky and internet in the US is slow and unreliable. There is no way that anything that requires connection back to the company server is going to work over slow broadband or dialup connections. Work has creeped into our homes at this point, but we are very limited on the amount we can genuinely do without going back into the office.

COVID-19. Until this point, internet speeds had dramatically increased and computing power has increased as well. Coworkers talk to each other through email, but also through instant-messenger-like software at work without leaving their desk. Collaborations happen inside shared documents and meetings have virtual options through software like Cisco Webex. The pieces were there, but it took COVID to drive adoption. Then we all went home and realized that all the things we were doing in the office could be done at our homes instead. We chatted with each other, we did video calls, we did virtual office parties, and all that software that used to only live on our work computers creeped onto our phones, tablets, and personal computers. Now, workers were managing software all day, every day. Talking to your coworkers in the hallway was now sending them a meme in a chat. Collaborating on a project was now email chains or using the collaboration tools built into documents and spreadsheets, leaving comments and notations instead of talking about it together as you were working. We were now professional computer-fiddlers, our labor boiled down to our ability to interface with computer systems. On top of this, work was always with us. We never fully shed the identity of our job when we clocked out. We became on-call (to varying degrees) at all times.

You know how kids think that teachers live at the school when class ends? Well, we all kind of lived in the office after the work day ended. We didn’t move into the office; the office moved into our homes.

Now, these experiences are not universal. The work from home movement had a profoundly positive impact on disabled professionals access to high-paying jobs and some people never got to go home, as their in-person job was deemed “essential”. Others just straightforwardly lost their employment. 

It was in this new post-COVID era where the world was introduced to ChatGPT and things would never be the same. While at first, the chatbot could just reply in a way that was vaguely human, it would not be this limited for long. Before long, this technology was able to read and summarize emails. The overly flowery emails that replaced in-person meetings could now be boiled down to their most basic components. We did have to dig through a paragraph of what the boss had done that weekend before getting to the meat of the tasks being assigned to us. When we would reply, we could have the computer clean up our writing, making us sound more fluent than we truly were, or it would write the whole thing itself, completely removing our personal voice from our work. We had become “software-brained”; every part of our day was reduced to documents, spreadsheets, emails, and databases. As tools became better, employer expectations became higher. Those who are not using AI to reduce their time spent on each task are getting left behind for people who are embracing the technology. We are being forced into this reality. 

There is a whole separate point to be made about how this positioned us almost perfect for replacement by AI systems, but I will save that for another writing. 

How AI Changed How I Work

My baseline used to be waking up and getting in a “ready stance”. I would be ready to jump on emails or messages that came my way and deal with them as they came in. Each little task wasn’t so hard because I was already in motion. This momentum catapulted me through the day and made me an incredible worker (if I do say so myself). Now, my baseline was a state of complete disengagement. Instead of being in my “ready stance”, I started to fill that place in my brain with “brain rot content” (as the kids say): YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, etc. When something would come across my virtual desk, it wasn’t my job to handle it. I’ll just have ChatGPT go grab the file and give you a response. Once it got the information, I put it in my own words, doing very little ideation about the task or problem trying to be solved, and hit send. I would then revert back to that state of stagnation. I never get into my flow. 

This lack of critical thinking and mental movement left me in a state of mental atrophy. I spent my time off laying around, on my phone, doing nothing as the day passed outside. When I was working, I would do as little as possible to allow me to get through the day and go back to that state of brain disconnection. The dishes and laundry started to pile up. Things around the house would break and I would just say “I’ll get to that later”. My spending increased as the media I consumed communicated to me that this is how I could engage with our current culture and get a feeling of satisfaction and belonging. It would never work. 

“Eustress” is a term used to describe “good stress”. These are things that propel us forward in ways that seem nagging or overwhelming in the moment, but ultimately result in better outcomes, because it helps up build momentum. The clearing of my inbox used to eustress for me; the feeling of a clean inbox became a signifier that I was caught up on my communications. Now, the inbox is “distress” for me, the kind of stress that causes a reduction in functioning. Now, as it piles up, I avoid other important communications on my phone, like texts from my parents and partner. I have unintentionally isolated myself.

This story could have started with me being “lazy” with my work and letting AI do tasks it for me…but I feel like there is more to the story. We are doing labor that is so radically different than what we are used to doing in human history. I love computers…and even I am fed up with being a professional computer fiddler. I used to work in IT. If I’m fed up, I can only imagine what Betty from accounting feels like!! There is some blend of AI usage that is good. If my boss gets a personal assistant and is considered a master at productivity, why can’t I have that too? How much work should I delegate to that assistant?

Closing Questions

• What does it mean to be a laborer in this post-COVID, AI-infused world?
• How do we feel satisfaction from our work when our work is largely done by impersonal, automated systems?
• If the robots do take most of our jobs, how do we successfully move to a culture where we don’t need to be productive to feel proud of ourselves?