Modern technology resembles that very asteroid that 66 million years ago changed the course of evolution on our planet. Only unlike the dinosaurs, we have a chance to adapt.
While the cataclysm of the past completely transformed the natural world of Earth, autonomous artificial intelligence is today preparing to bring about a similar upheaval in our professional ecosystem. This may particularly affect the realm of intellectual labor — the very area we have long considered the untouched territory of humans. To understand the scale of the upcoming changes, it is important to first understand what intellectual labor is and what it consists of.
What we understand by intellectual labor
Intellectual labor is a rather vague term, especially in our time when almost any professional activity has undergone digital transformation. Historically, this term referred to any form of non-physical labor. But in reality, many professions involve both mental and physical tasks.
Home builders, gardeners, and pastry chefs all apply specialized knowledge, skills, and personal experience in their crafts but are rarely considered representatives of intellectual labor. This is a clear injustice of our conventional classification of professions.
In practice, we define intellectual labor based on a person's education, their behavior in the workplace, and their employment status. People working in positions requiring professional education — for example, in medicine, engineering, or business administration — are considered intellectual laborers. This also includes those who spend most of their time in front of computer screens, participate in meetings, and present results in the form of documents, presentations, and spreadsheets.
Before the pandemic, it was possible to simply and mostly accurately describe intellectual labor as work done in offices. But today there are so many hybrid work schemes that the term 'office work' has lost its practical meaning.
The three pillars of intellectual labor
Perhaps the most accurate way to define intellectual labor is to analyze the typical tasks performed by its representatives. These tasks are usually divided into three broad categories.
Project management
Project management is often an unloved but absolutely necessary investment of time to inform colleagues and managers about work plans and progress. Project management manifests itself in the form of meetings, status reports, emails, Telegram messages, Zoom calls, etc. As work becomes increasingly specialized and organizations less hierarchical, coordinating activities within and between different teams becomes more important and time-consuming.
Preparatory work
Preparatory work consists of endless tasks that must be completed before one can start real work, or after its formal completion. Preparatory work has very little intrinsic value but is a significant prerequisite or mandatory postscript to tasks that create value. For example, outside observers may be surprised to learn that programmers spend very little time directly writing code. They dedicate significant time to preparatory tasks such as managing development environments, researching APIs, testing code, documenting code, and so on.
Real work
Real work is the type of work that intellectual laborers enjoy the most. It involves using formal education, practical skills, and prior experience to create some tangible artifact that has clear value. Typically, it is creative activity that engages talents in critical thinking, analysis, and deduction. The products resulting from real work are applicable in a business context.
The terms used above are conditional and do not always have established definitions. They are subject to individual interpretation in the context of specific work. Nevertheless, participants in intellectual labor intuitively understand these differences. They hate project management, are endlessly frustrated by preparatory work, and feel that they spend too little time doing real work that realizes their professional capabilities and leads to effective practical results.
How autonomous artificial intelligence will affect various types of intellectual labor
A network of specialized autonomous artificial intelligence systems, which is seen as a vital component of every work collective in the future, will have a disruptive impact on project management. This network will maintain up-to-date knowledge about the nature and status of most current tasks, as it will perform many of them. Instant availability of such information will eliminate the need for many meetings, calls, and messages that occur today.
Employees will have personal AI assistants that will inform them about the plans and progress of both humans and robots at any desired frequency. They will also be able to convey personal concerns, questions, and encouragement through this network of autonomous systems. After some practice, personal assistants will be able to anticipate human concerns and questions and gather relevant information to address the issues of interest without reminders.
The demands for project management will also decrease simply because fewer people will be involved in it. We are already hearing voices from techno-optimists: 'This is wonderful! No more meaningless meetings!' But there is also a downside — fewer jobs for people.
Perhaps the greatest time savings provided by autonomous artificial intelligence will be related to reducing preparatory work. Many preparatory tasks are repetitive, follow known procedural patterns, and require very little creative thinking. Such tasks are ideally suited for full or partial automation.
Real work will be more resilient to the pressure of artificial intelligence, especially those forms of this work that require original thinking, emotional understanding, reasoning by analogy, historical knowledge, discovering information through the analysis of disparate data, creative problem-solving, and so on.
Survival guide for the workplace after the AI apocalypse
The extinction of many forms of intellectual labor practiced today will bring to the forefront those activities that create real practical value. The creation of this value is primarily, if not exclusively, aimed at the main forms of intellectual labor described above. Intellectual laborers instinctively understand what constitutes genuine work because colleagues capable of performing more or better significant creative tasks earn more money and hold more impressive positions even in today's environment.
In the Darwinian struggle for survival in the workplace, which is about to begin as autonomous artificial intelligence systems develop, people need to find ways to dedicate more time to improving and performing real intellectual work that utilizes their uniquely human mental abilities, while actively handing over project management and grunt work to their digital assistants. Paraphrasing a popular saying: 'You won't lose your job to artificial intelligence; you'll lose it to someone else who managed to better integrate AI into their work!'
Once, oil and gas formed from the remains of dinosaurs gave humanity the opportunity to build modern civilization. Perhaps liberating our intellectual potential from routine tasks through artificial intelligence will become the fuel for the next evolutionary leap. But unlike the dinosaurs, we have a choice — to adapt or to disappear. And the time to decide is now.
