The Real Future of AI and Work

The AI Daily Brief: Artificial Intelligence News and Analysis

This episode of The AI Daily Brief explores the evolving relationship between artificial intelligence and human work, moving beyond the simp

Key takeaways

• AI does not replace human work but instead increases demand for expert judgment and creativity.
• The most effective workflows involve collaboration between humans and AI agents, with humans providing context, oversight, and decision-making.

Main topics

• AI's impact on the future of employment
• Human-AI collaboration in workflows

Notable quotes

"After Automation, There Will Be More Human Work Than Ever." – Dan Schipper

Conclusion

The future of AI and work isn't about job loss—it's about transformation. As automation frees up

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:00) You know, it's a really boring conversation. Will AI take all of our jobs? This, unfortunately, is the conversation about jobs that the AI industry has wanted to have for far too long. But finally, we are starting to get a little more thoughtful consideration as more time passes and it turns out AI doesn't just take all the jobs. What AI does do is change the entire landscape of how we work on both individual levels, on team levels, in terms of what we can individually inspire to, in terms of what our teams can aspire to, in terms of how companies should organize themselves, in terms of what skills we should prioritize. And all of those are the really interesting and productive conversations to have about AI and jobs. And that is exactly what we are talking about today. The AI Daily Brief is a daily podcast and video about the most important news and discussions in AI. Speaker 1 (0:56) All right, friends, quick announcements before we dive in. First of all, thank you to today's sponsors, Blitzy, Robots and Pencils, Harbor, and HyperAgent. To get an ad-free version of the show, go to patreon.com slash ai-dailybrief, or you can subscribe on Apple Podcasts. And to learn more about sponsoring the show, send us a note at sponsors at ai-dailybrief.ai. Now, keep an eye out in general at ai-dailybrief.ai. In addition to the website having the full summaries of each episode broken into the key quotes, key numbers, et cetera, You can also find out about upcoming events like our free webinar coming up this week on August 26th about agentic loops for knowledge workers. And you'll also get a lot more information about upcoming training programs. The next iteration of our executive agent leadership program led by Nufar Gaspar is kicking off after Labor Day. And again, you can get all of that information at ai-dailybrief.ai. Now, today's episode is, of course, a weekend long read slash big think episode. And our friends over at Every have the perfect big think content for right now. Every recently announced their first conference called Thesis. And alongside it, they announced a new project called Thesis Statements that will have 100 builders and thinkers write short essays about the future that they envision coming with AI. Every CEO, Dan Schipper, put it this way. We believe there is a bright future for human work after automation. And we believe that there's a small group of humans who know what it looks like because they live the answers every day. But their ideas are still largely missing from the mainstream discourse about AI. That's why we're creating a public record of what people at the frontier are seeing now, so we can get these ideas to as many people as possible. For those of you who want to go check it out for yourself, you can find this at every.to slash thesis dash statements. I will, of course, include a link in the show notes. And what we're going to do is look at a set of these first 25 statements. read the short essays that go along with them, and then, of course, I'll give my thoughts. We're going to organize them into a few categories, and the first category we'll call foundations. And it is Dan himself who I think puts a fine point on the thesis that surrounds all of this with his short essay, After Automation, There Will Be More Human Work Than Ever. Dan writes, One thing CEO, knowledge workers, and investors seem to agree on is that AI is a threat to jobs, the economy, safety, and human meaning. But... If you talk to anyone in the AI industry or to early adopters outside of it, you'll hear the same thing we've noticed internally here at Every. There's more work to do than ever. I don't believe there will be a tipping point where things flip and the jobs are gone. The new reality is the opposite. The more we automate, the more expert human work there is to do. Here's why. AI commoditizes the residue of human expertise, whatever can be made explicit enough to train on. That collapses the value of default model output and creates demand for what's different. Demand for what's different is demand for human experts, even as we approach artificial general intelligence. Every is a team of almost 30 people, and we haven't fired all of our employees in favor of agents. We haven't ditched software as a service products in favor of vibe-coded apps. We still hire humans to do customer service with a lot of agent assistants, and we still hire human writers and editors and engineers. Sure, employee agents take over more of the stable, repeatable, well-framed layer of work. But there is a lot of work that still requires a human being in the loop. We've found over and over that for any kind of complex task, the best way to get great work is to have an AI and a human going back and forth in the same workspace. Humans are still vital. In every example, the agent needs a human in order for the work to, well, work. The further away an agent gets from a human who is in charge of making sure it works well, the less well it works. Someone has to point it at the right thing, decide whether the output is good, catch the places where it is wrong, and turn the result into a real-life decision or process. That's because the current generation of models only knows about work that has been done. Humans know about what needs to be done, right now. Humans are alive to a specific time, customer, codebase, and conversation in a way the training corpus isn't yet. The aliveness isn't just having more current data. We come to the moment from somewhere, with a continuous, constantly new perspective of our own. running wants, running concerns, and a running read on what matters, which changes what we see. Making expert work cheaper does not therefore simply replace experts. It creates more situations where expert judgment is needed. A great start to this whole project from Dan, but before I comment on this particular section, I actually want to pile on one more. This one is from former strategy consultant and author Paul Millard and is called The People Declaring Work Is Solved Will Still Be Working. Paul writes, There is no after automation unless we can radically expand our modern conception of work. For now, we are stuck in what I call a job-shaped reality distortion field. We flatten any conception of work down to activities with a job description and a paycheck. In this reality, we turn humans into numbers and talk about abstract topics like layoffs, employment rates, weak links, bundles of tasks, and lumps of labor. Work is much bigger than this. This month, I have been busy soothing my newborn at 4am, transporting my three-year-old to school, cooking at home, responding to emails, and carving out a little time for writing, which may earn money or not. Despite accusations of wasting my talents and being unemployed, my days are full of work, and I am fulfilled. At the same time, we hear loud pronouncements from 23-year-olds in Silicon Valley declaring that work is solved. In two years, maybe three, there will be nothing left to do. But then who will change my daughter's diaper? The thing that makes me laugh about these pronouncements is that they come from people drunk on work, waxing philosophical between all-night coding sessions. But if you ask them if their lives are designed around work, they'd say no because their job is optional. They can job hop or take sabbaticals, all while getting the things humans crave. Things like dignity, challenge, purpose from the lives they inhabit. Lives centered around work. People without such lives are mystified. What do you mean work is ending? To them, a job is not optional. The work doesn't end when you leave the office. We don't yet have language big enough for where we are going. We live in an era in which people have an easier time imagining the end of the world than life with a free Tuesday afternoon. We need to take off our job goggles and see that our lives are already full of work. If we took the time to look at work, not just in job-shaped form, we might find our way forward. So in these two essays, you have two very different ends working towards the same middle. The idea that there will always be more work. Now for Paul, who you just heard, this is in the fact that the substance of our life is full of all sorts of work, even if it's not the kind that comes with