🧑‍🏭 How 2022 Changed our View of Work

I'm confounded by how much I wrote about work this year. I wrote 20 app reviews for work collaboration and project management. I filled my TikTok feed with anecdotes of my job interview fails. I told how my professional anxiety caused me to quit social media in 2014. I described my struggles with covid measures at length. To this day chunks of 2020-2021 still feel like a blur. My kids were sick all December long. The flashbacks to last year's madness startled me.

When I think of you, I envision somebody overwhelmed by huge amounts of information. Just like me! Feeling restless because of meetings that should have been emails, drowned by email threads where you're trying to figure out why you're looped in, or driven in rabbit holes of panicked social media posts over inflation and the recession. We're in this together, and I hope my thoughts about work gave you some peace of mind. It sure did provide some to me writing them.

Let's look at the state of work in 2022 and try to figure out how, as employees, we should look at the future, shall we?

🏠 1. Wondering about the Future of Remote Work

Workers responded favourably to the forced remote work. I shared this survey from Future.com that showed how employees enjoy the massive benefits of working from home: absence of commute, fewer distractions, and fewer politics.

But then the tides turned.

Salesforce appears emblematic. I cited Stewart Butterfield, ex-CEO of Slack Technologies, as an example of how the future of work would shape itself based on efficient communications. That was before Salesforce announced atrocious sales numbers. Now, Butterfield exited Salesforce. A Slack message from CEO Marc Benioff leaked last week. The executive questions remote employee productivity: "Are we not building tribal knowledge with new employees without an office culture?". It has come full circle.

What gives? The best way to bring back employees to the office is to make the workplace attractive. Spotify showed it best with its "wellness rooms". We joke about the office becoming a spa just like people joked about having XBoxes and pool tables 20 years ago! As I wrote, the future of work feels like home.

As a parent, I crave flexibility. In 2021, I could not have attended the office on a standard 9 to 5 shift for 106 days. My employer trusted me to get my job done during evenings and weekends. We both won out in the end. Being with children all day also made me desire to have rational discussions, which brought me back to the office. Things can work out in the end. It's a matter of incentives.

🤫 2. Great Resignation, Quiet Quitting, and Mass Layoffs

Speaking of full circle, here comes the quiet quitter discussion. I wrote in Five Ways the Pandemic Impact Was Oversold:

People "quiet quit" because in the crazy "everybody is full of newly-printed money" world of covid stimulus, driven by tech companies' perceived messianic stance, they could. Demand for talent exceeded the supply! Economics 101!

It's not GenZ getting into an existential crisis. It's the same slackers you've met all your life who got a kick of a favourable job market.

With a recession looming, resignations lost their glamour. This begs the question: how should we feel about the landscape? I've seen all sorts of takes. Quiet quitting seems to me like the worst option. Based on my research in 7 Tips for Dealing with Layoff Anxiety, senior management does look at performance metrics and dollars spent on everybody (yes, we're all numbers, in the end, we have to deal with it). If you coast, you will get caught in the storm.

What about job switching? Seniority plays a part in layoff calculations: last in, first out. My advice would be to go back to the fundamentals: is there room for growth? Am I enjoying the people? Are leaders empathetic?  

🐦 3. Elon Musk's "Hardcore Mode"

Speaking of bad leaders... I choose not to discuss much of the Twitter fiasco in the past 2 months. There was too much noise. Musk's "Hardcore Twitter" job culture will be a social experiment. Imagine it succeeds. Everyone hops on the bandwagon. Next thing you know, tech becomes about a 60-hours week grind. Code is the only output that matters. Who says healthy work-life balance, let alone work-family balance, here?

"Success" becomes a relative measure in such a context. I was optimistic about the potential for Musk to usher in a new era of social media based on the web3 principle of decentralization. What if users owned their content? What if they could "tip" each other? Maybe we would see more transparency with the feed algorithm... It feels so remote, doesn't it?

Even if Twitter ends up as a safe haven for democratic speech, would that justify the costs of wrongful terminations and shaming?

🤖 4. The impacts of AI on Your Job

My most-read piece from 2022 was Is AI About to Take Your Job? In it, I observed ChatGPT's strengths and limitations. You enjoyed my nuanced takes. What have we learned since?

Art is the sector most upset by generative AI

In this interview, OpenAI's CEO opens up on DALL-E 2's impact on the public's imagination. I love the examples of democratization that he brings up: people enhancing their wedding websites, and fancying their new homes. Artists will lose major sources of income for corporate material.

Some are mobilizing. The website "haveibeentrained.com" made headlines. Stable Diffusion 3 will allow an opt-out feature, which artists claim should be opt-in. Meanwhile, the US Copyright Office denied copyright on an AI-generated picture.

As someone who fancies himself as a writer, I fail to grasp the extent of the artists' wrath. ChatGPT can imitate James Joyce, but it could never come up with Finnegan's Wake. Its poetry is mediocre at best. It can tell a compelling story but never break new ground. It can't touch emotions without massive human input.

Maybe artists bet too much on the actual craft, rather than the intuition, being their differentiation? If you evolve in this field, I'd love to have your take.

Should AI output be Watermarked?

In its well-researched piece, the MIT Technology Review provides advice on how to spot fake text. It gives additional details to my intuition when I called ChatGPT "template-ish". It's a "perfect sentence" generator. Humans err. This shows our depth.

The text also mentions how OpenAI has been working on an invisible embedding to allow fast detection of generated content. China banned AI content without watermarks. This will be necessary, if only to avoid whole high school diplomas becoming useless due to mass cheating.

Thinking Forward about AI In Education

Educators should think of creative ways to adapt to generative AI. When you think about it, the gap with how preceding generations learned to use the calculator in maths classes is not that wide. We learned to use the calculator to automate menial operations, and maths became all about solving problems. Teachers have a unique edge on ChatGPT: we know something it doesn't: the truth!

🛍 5. What Will the First Disruptions Look Like?

Content creator Brian O'Connor proposed 6 industries that generative AI will disrupt if people don't adapt: design, consultancy, content creation, software development, art, and education.

I disagree with some of his points. I believe we are more likely to see "super orchestrators" emerge in the tech and advertising sector, where we will see the first true business applications of AI. OpenAI estimates it will generate $1 Billion in revenue by 2024. Apps that license its contents are expected to become the main source of revenue.

• We will see a fully automated, end-to-end, marketing and digital advertising campaign product in the next 6 months. Google and Meta are working on similar technology. Their core business is advertising. It's a no-brainer. Marketing tech (Marktech) will emerge with tailored solutions for continuous copywriting, social media management, PR relations, and digital growth. Add video advertisements and podcasts for good measure. Why not embedded deepfakes? It's a bundle game. A simple person will power what used to be a department.
• We will see a new class of AI-coded apps. Just like the cloud allowed thousands of emerging apps to get a headstart without buying a server, generative AI will allow problem-solvers to launch an online business without knowing how to code. We will see mobile app stores swarmed. Many AI-assisted games will strike big in the next few months. I also envision bright days for ecosystems such as Salesforce, where people will publish apps without worrying about infrastructure.
• There will be an unexpected "Uber" disruption. Uber broke the Taxi industry. Which sector will AI break in a similar fashion? We can't know for sure. AI's power will end up solving a real-world problem that nobody saw coming, and people will flock to the street in anger.

🏥 6. Will Healthcare ever budge?

Here's my wishful thinking. If I had to pick, the disruption would hit the healthcare administration. When I wrote about the Theranos fraud, I speculated that health was tech's final frontier. The sector carries too many regulations and ethical concerns, which are incompatible with the high-growth, high margins model of venture capital.

What if AI can make a dent? Consumer advocacy enterprise DoNoPay already launched a GPT-powered app that automatically negotiates down your internet and phone bills! Why can't we have a similar app that allows patients to plow through healthcare's obscure patterns? Why can't we have, in 2022, an AI that waits on our behalf in the ER?

I still go to hospital appointments with faxes and paper records.

ChatGPT can eat bureaucracy alive.

What About You?

Share with me how you think AI will make your job easier, or your future bleaker!

AI Can't Out-Cute Me!

🥊 Quick Hits

• Apple plans to support third-party app stores by 2024. Apple has been under heavy criticism for its 30% app store tax. Allowing sideloading would tamper antitrust complaints. I think Apple is betting on the convenient option being the one used by everybody, and the App store will remain the most convenient. (Story)
• Apple plans to launch a Google competitor in search. Google pays $15 billion to have Google set up as the default search engine of the iPhone. Apple would strengthen its hold on users' data and pressure Google into a higher bidding war if it had search worth a damn. (Story)

🎧 Quote of the Week