Generative AI is replacing remote work in the future of work debate

economictimes.indiatimes.com:

Work’s main issue is no longer the future of inanimate bricks and mortar of offices — significant economically though this is to city centers, commutes and the real-estate industry. Nor is it about the alternative “space” of the much-vaunted metaverse, which Wired Magazine describes as so vague that if you replace it with cyberspace “ninety percent of the time, the meaning won’t substantially change.”

Instead, the next chapter of work concerns the gamechanger of ChatGPT, which arrived in November 2022.

It took everyone by surprise, gaining about one million users in five days. OpenAI’s conversational chatbot not only blew open the doors on the idea that computers could generate ideas and de facto mimic humans, but it heralded a new era in which white collar professional workers were directly threatened.

This group’s job security had previously been inoculated against the arrival of new technology.

Now articles with titles like “How To Save Your Job From ChatGPT” are aimed squarely at such workers and it’s a shock to the system. The promise is that AI will save time, save work, allow humans to be their best creative selves, but the risk is the exact opposite.

By way of illustration, I typed this article on a very fast new laptop.

It was definitely quicker than a typewriter or old-fashioned pen and paper, so I’m not complaining and I’m not naïve. But if I tell you that the AI-assisted tools have made my task significantly slower due to all the pop-ups and “intuitive” suggestions you might smile indulgently at my technophobia.

You might also nod in recognition: This isn’t generative AI but its sibling, predictive AI. For the first time my “knowledge work,” as the great management guru Peter Drucker called it, is