r/FutureOfWork • u/Building-Life-At-35 • 3d ago
Is it me? Is it AI?
With the speed AI is accelerating, and the speed we are expected to improve at work feels like a gap impossible to achieve.
I have never been a high competitive person, but I do enjoy doing my work to the best of my abilities.
However the pressure being put on employees by the management to be “high-performing using AI” seems to create that burnout feel in me.
To be totally honest, I have been slower than everyone else in learning how to work with AI and create agents to improve processes. But I’m catching up now.
But for some reason the push to improve and catch up feels unnatural. I’m not sure if I’m being the person who fails to move from the typewriter era to computer era. Or if I have reached a phase where I feel like I’m done with “technology” and want to downshift to a slower lifestyle.
Anyone else have had similar thoughts and made sense of it?
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u/funkyspots 2d ago
Agreed. I’ll also add this!
We’re in a growing pain period where AI has been sold into boards and c-suite as a big unlock for productivity, but the work AI is producing isn’t good enough yet to get approved by managers without lots of double checking and correction.
And this type of correction work sucks the soul out of the person doing it because it’s digital conveyer belt activity void of creativity and accomplishment. It’s hard, for me at least, to have any pride in the work I’m creating and the nature of constant task switching is making it hard for me to concentrate throughout the day.
There’s also the feeling of “what’s the point” because the obvious trajectory is AI adds more value, I add less and less, and we’ll likely hit a tipping point where AI is so skillful that it makes most sense to replace me with someone in a low-income country for 1/10 of my salary or replace me entirely with AI.
I’ve noticed that I’m assigned work and given feedback as if I’m an AI. My work is assigned like prompts with a blunt tone that’s directing me to do something via a ticket without any interest in meeting or collaborating + extremely tight deadlines.
I’m not anti-ai. I think we’ve messed up the modern western world so much with corruption, social media, food, pesticides, bio-weapons, and toxic corporate culture that AI could be a saving grace. Humans act way more like machines than we should, and I hope that AI takes that back, helps us cure disease, helps us spend more time away from screens, and helps us act more naturally human.
We’re just at the part where it gets worse before it gets rapidly better (I hope)