Open to Work

Across the Industrial Revolutions, new forms of energy emerged, from steam to electricity. Those new forms of energy supported new forms of technology, from the assembly line to the internet. And with those new forms of technology, economic growth all over the world has increasingly come from one thing above all else: the ability to produce more goods and services, faster and cheaper.

As a result, our economies started prizing skills that would support efficiency at scale the most, especially analytical and technical skills. As humans at work, our value was measured by how effectively we could support technology executing more, better, faster. A few of us did work that involved innovating and thinking creatively but, for the most part, even that work was about creating new goods and services that helped consumers and businesses do more, better, faster.

Today we’re all mostly manning assembly lines, operating registers, driving tractors, building spreadsheets, writing code, managing meetings, and responding to emails. So. Many. Emails. In every case, across so many of our jobs, our value has been tied to our ability to help organizations achieve that same goal: more output, better quality, faster delivery.

Then came AI.

Suddenly, so much of what we’ve trained ourselves to do, so much of what our economy has valued most, AI started to do. And it started to do it more efficiently than we ever could, becoming better by the day at precisely the kind of technical and analytical capabilities our economies currently prize above all else. Of course we’re worried.

But that fear misses something crucial: Our competitive edge as a species was never our capacity for processing and producing more, better, faster in the first place.

As AI starts to handle the “more, better, faster” work that has consumed so much of our time and energy, we will finally have the opportunity to reclaim the work that only we can do. Work that is based on what makes us uniquely human.