how chatbots are turning white collar jobs into absurdist theater

The new edict in the office: use our AI, or else.

You know that a tool is amazing when you have to shove it down everyone’s throat at every opportunity, going to far as to threaten people into using it when you can. This is the case at Meta, where Darth Zuckerberg is basically telling his employees to use LLMs or lose their jobs, adding their AI utilization to their performance reviews.

There’s a very similar edict at Microsoft and a number of other companies which are involved in training, hyping, or deploying large AI models, which means that at some point, nearly all of us are going to be judged by how much of our work we outsource to the chatbot of choice for our employers.

Yes, sure, people at companies making those bots struggle to use them to come up with consistently decent work and complain about those who rely on LLMs for every task, saying their work is subpar and riddled with errors, but we are all “moving into our new, AI-native world because that’s just what the future is,” so employees simply letting it rip and worrying about the consequences never, are going to get a glowing review. Until they’re laid off because, well, it’s layoff season.

Which brings us to two very important questions in all this. If the focus is on using AI to do everything, why even bother with employees? What exactly are they doing if a chatbot writes and reads their emails, summarizes their presentations, generates all of their code, and handles all of their customer service issues? If everything I do has to go through an AI, why am I there?

The second question is what happens when shareholders decide to clean house now that all work is being done by AI for good or ill. Despite billing themselves as vaunted job creators, the owner class now seems aghast at the notion of employing flesh and blood people, giving them meaningful work, and treating them as human beings.

So, when they see that all their employees do is prompt an AI, their next reflex will be to automate that too and finally get rid of all those pesky workers they no longer see as people in no small part thanks to those LLMs. An experiment by a Wired reporter shows that right now, this would be an absolute clusterfuck, but big tech is trying to make what OpenAI’s Sam Altman called a one person billion dollar startup a reality.

It would be the triumph of shareholder primacy. A company that trains no one, has no employees collecting salaries, produces nothing tangible, occupies no space, and its valuation is completely untethered from reality, merely a function of its PR hype. If the product or service that company actually churns out won’t work, well, that’s not their concern. They’re just investors and shareholders.

Of course, none of this will work, and even tech oligarchs who are committed to LLMs as a matter of religious principle know this. This is why they keep promising a job and stress free post-scarcity utopia in a AI dominated world, despite doing the opposite of helping this world come about.

If they did, it would make their money effectively meaningless, which means they can no longer rule over the poors with it, and they would rather die in an apocalypse than let that happen. Nope, that’s not even remotely a joke. They really would.

If all this sounds incredibly stupid to you, like we’ve built a system in which most jobs are just a way for the wealthy to give us money to go buy stuff as an excuse to play in their own casino where the rules are profoundly different and the only thing that even remotely matters is how much our consumption goes up by one measure or another, yeah, that’s what happened. And all these AI usage mandates are doing are making it more and more blatantly obvious.