You may have seen news reports lately about the ways in which AI is taking over what were once generally considered white collar duties. People are using it to write emails, to take notes, to compile presentations. Doctors are using it to record your symptoms, lawyers are using it to 'research' cases and real estate agents are using it for...everything.
Yet as more bosses begin to mandate AI's use in the office, and more professionals bring it ever more into their working lives (whether of their own free will, or because of company orders), have any of them ever stopped to wonder just what it is they do, exactly?
A white collar job does not generally involve manual tasks. It is, for the most part (and sorry if this sounds like an ad slogan), a job of the mind. From managers to HR, events to compliance, accountants to physicians, people are in those jobs and are getting paid for them because of their (supposed) ability to communicate with others, analyse things and interpret meaning from events. To draw upon their training, their experiences and their beliefs to do their work.
Let's say I'm an office manager or a HR rep, and my job is to settle a dispute between two workers. To settle that dispute is part of my job, it's why I am there. My skills at talking to people and conveying my thoughts and opinions via email are why I am being paid. If I open up ChatGPT and ask a machine how to do it--a machine that does not know how to do it, it only knows how to synthesise one million examples of this, because it is a machine--I am not doing that work anymore. Anyone could have asked the machine that question.
Or, if I'm a lawyer and my job is to prepare for a case, I am about to get paid a lot of money, because legal work isn't just hard, it requires a lot of training and has a lot of responsibility attached to it. If I start using ChatGPT to cut corners and research things for me, or even help me write things, why should I keep getting lawyer money if some kid off the street could have punched in the same prompts?
These people are hastening their own obsolescence, not because AI can do their work (it can't), but because by thinking it can they've shown themselves to be some of the dumbest people in the workforce, a collection of rubes who will throw decades of best practice out the window just because some Silicon Valley billionaire is jangling a shiny set of keys at them.
For all of the defence of AI from its boosters, cries that it's just a 'tool', it's anything but. We are years into this supposed revolution and AI is still hallucinating, making basic citation errors and failing to understand the nuance of a situation because it will never be able to. Robots might be able to do the work of a human arm, but the human brain is clearly a different story.
A combine harvester that does the work of ten farmhands is a tool. A nailgun that lets a builder put a frame up in a fraction of the time it would have taken with a hammer is a tool. Whatever the effect of these technologies on labour or capital in those contexts, it is indisputable that those tools can do the exact same work, only faster.
A machine that tries to do your job and fails (in sometimes spectacular, embarrassing and even dangerous ways) but which you keep using anyway isn't a tool. It's a scam, one you and your bosses have fallen for. In racing to make use of it in an office job you're not optimising workflow or not getting left behind, you're showing that you either cannot or are now simply choosing not to do your job anymore.
Letting a machine write your emails or a talk or spin up a PowerPoint presentation isn't cutting corners, those tasks are literally what you're being paid for. That work is the work.
