The worst part of the old, dying system is the expectation that you perform emotional labour voluntarily. Prior to AI, intelligence was a scarce commodity meaning tokens of intelligence (i.e. - "education") was the only pre-requisite for intellectual work employers valued. Now that AI has turned such intelligence into a freely accessible service, those tokens are now worthless, and the only labour that has any long term value is emotional, the kind AI cannot and never will be able to perform.
We were never compensated for being miserable for 8 hours while we traded our intellect to a corporation or government that thought of us as nothing but replaceable human resources. Nor were we compensated for bringing that misery home, being absent emotionally for our family, very often leading to many among us to lose them.
Our mental health stagnated and collapsed while our parents and the system they built told us to just "suck it up," and work through the pain of knowing we were giving the best of ourselves to bosses, CEO's, shareholders, bureaucrats, and politicians who really couldn't care one way or another if we lived or died.
All the while the ones who were the true source of wealth, happiness, and meaning (our family, especially our children) suffered the consequences of our absence.
Thank God that system dies on the alter of AI, which may be able to think and reason infinitely faster than we do, but absent the nervous system that makes us human, will never be able to feel and be present the way only we can.
The worst part of the old, dying system is the expectation that you perform emotional labour voluntarily. Prior to AI, intelligence was a scarce commodity meaning tokens of intelligence (i.e. - "education") was the only pre-requisite for intellectual work employers valued. Now that AI has turned such intelligence into a freely accessible service, those tokens are now worthless, and the only labour that has any long term value is emotional, the kind AI cannot and never will be able to perform.
We were never compensated for being miserable for 8 hours while we traded our intellect to a corporation or government that thought of us as nothing but replaceable human resources. Nor were we compensated for bringing that misery home, being absent emotionally for our family, very often leading to many among us to lose them.
Our mental health stagnated and collapsed while our parents and the system they built told us to just "suck it up," and work through the pain of knowing we were giving the best of ourselves to bosses, CEO's, shareholders, bureaucrats, and politicians who really couldn't care one way or another if we lived or died.
All the while the ones who were the true source of wealth, happiness, and meaning (our family, especially our children) suffered the consequences of our absence.
Thank God that system dies on the alter of AI, which may be able to think and reason infinitely faster than we do, but absent the nervous system that makes us human, will never be able to feel and be present the way only we can.