“Oh, so you’re here to replace us.”
That was one of the first things said at a project kickoff.
I was there to work with a team of creatives. We were going to look at their processes and see whether AI could remove some friction. They weren’t exactly thrilled at the prospect.
I don’t think their reaction was unreasonable. When your livelihood depends on the work you do, someone promising to make that work disappear can sound like a threat.
We went through their processes anyway. Not just the creative parts, but all the little jobs around them. The files, the handoffs, the annoying details that nobody signed up for.
At the end I asked, “What can I do to make your workday easier?”
An awkward silence.
Then the suggestions started. Copying things manually. Renaming files. Fixing mistakes. Little chores that ate time and attention. One thing reminded them of another, and another, until we had a list of about twenty things they would be quite happy never to do again.
The meeting started with “You’re here to replace us.” It ended with a long list of things they wanted replaced.
There’s something strange about the way we talk about technological progress.
The whole point of inventing technology is to make life better. We don’t build machines because we’re nostalgic about digging holes with a shovel. If there’s a better way to dig the hole, why should anyone have to spend the day breaking their back?
Except that’s a lousy question to ask someone who only gets paid when they’re holding the shovel. You can’t tell them their shovel is obsolete and expect them to celebrate when they don’t know how they’re going to eat tonight.
Imagine you’ve been working in a field all day. You’re exhausted. Someone comes along with dinner, ready, and says they can do that every day. Wouldn’t you take it?
Well, you probably would. Unless accepting meant losing your only way to make a living, with no guarantee that dinner would keep coming.
That’s the uncomfortable part of the AI conversation. We’re getting better at producing things with less human labor, but most people still need to sell their labor to make a living.
The wealthiest people can make money from what they own, not just from the hours they work. If machines start doing more of the work, why shouldn’t more people get to benefit that way?
It’s not an automatic consequence of better technology. A company can use AI to make its employees’ days easier, or to cut jobs. Sometimes the very same improvement can do both. People are right to worry about that. And we won’t solve the question of who gets the benefits just by building more impressive tools.
But it seems absurd to make keeping everyone busy the objective. If a task is painful, repetitive and contributes nothing beyond what it produces, removing it should be good news. The challenge is making sure the people who used to do it are actually better off.
That’s what I was trying to do with the creative team. I didn’t want to take away their creativity, their judgment or the parts of the job they loved. I wanted to get the copying, renaming and avoidable mistakes out of their way, so they could spend more time on the work that mattered to them.
Of course, automating twenty annoying tasks at one company doesn’t fix the economics of an entire technological revolution. There’s still the question of who keeps the savings, who has a say, and what happens when the next thing we automate is something people actually enjoy doing.
But it’s a decent place to start: ask people what they would be glad never to do again. Then make sure removing that work improves their lives.
I walked into that meeting as the guy who might replace them. I walked out with a list of things they wanted me to replace instead.