If I were in charge of firing and hiring at my department, would I fire our secretary Julie, given that an AI agent can do everything that she does?
No, absolutely not. Julie has what the AI agent never will. She’s a people magnet. She genuinely loves people and is curious about them. People flock to her. The department came alive when she started working for us. Julie is very good at being human, which is exactly the thing that AI can’t do. She is the beating heart of the department. We’ve had other secretaries, and I can absolutely see how they can be substituted with AI.
The things that social media and remote work have taken away from us, AI can give back to us. This is not my idea. It’s my sister’s, and I don’t want to be a plagiarist, so I’m crediting her for it. We have a bunch of people among service personnel who never came back after COVID and continued working remotely. They will now have to think hard what it is that they offer to the workplace that cannot be outsourced to AI.
There was a person in student advisement with whom I had a great relationship that brightened up my life. Then she went remote and became a drone. The university eventually got rid of her position, and I can see why.
We all experienced this during COVID when, for example, all of our conferences became remote. At first, people were excited because you can save money and trouble. But after two years, everybody was sick of the experiment. The university raised the amount it gave us in funding to go to in-person conferences, and everybody was ecstatic to jump back on the conference circuit. Everybody discovered that the human aspect was the most important part of the conferences.
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