Future Work

Normally there's a lot of work that goes into making applications for businesses, something for the HR department, something for inventory, something to track sales and CRMs. The intent behind these efforts is very sound. We do it because we want to make companies more efficient, we want the data in a structured manner so that we can do analysis on it - and there's been a lot of success from these efforts in other companies, so everyone thinks that if they do these things in their own companies, they will be able to reach those same levels of success. All this makes sense. But the tricky part remains that people don't interact through these applications by default. Businesses are meant to serve the needs of people and the default way people interact is talking. Even text messages are a representation of talking. Instead of this, these applications force people to learn other means of interacting with each other, click this app icon to start up my ERP system, look through different dashboards to find the number I'm looking for, take that number and several others like it and put them on a spreadsheet, plot a graph and see the trend, take that trend and put it on a deck on PowerPoint, take the deck and add some text around the number to explain why we think it's the way it is, then send it over to someone else in the same company via email and wait for them to agree with us and then hopefully a couple dozen meetings later we can action something.

In fact we've gotten so sophisticated in working with these systems that we've implemented entire syllabuses and education systems to churn out people who can interact with such systems. We think that these are the skills that are needed to survive in today's world. The logic tracks as to how we have ended up in such a position and things are kind of working so far, but with the constantly growing pressures around employment one can't help but think that maybe there's an alternative, maybe it's not very sustainable to focus so much attention on these roles.

In the latest advent 1. of AI, it's really taken the world by storm 2.. It looks like more of a disruptor to a lot of people for a lot of valid reasons. One of them being how fast and efficient it can be in these support roles. Currently, my go-to model is Claude 4.5 Opus and even with my 5 years experience writing code, there's no way I can churn out a website faster than it. I can dig through a visualization tool like Metabase quickly enough and find an answer to a question about a database that I designed and built, but if I let Claude query the data for me it's a matter of seconds. It's so much better at this kind of thing than I think anyone can ever be, it wins on raw speed. 3.

One of the best forms of work we've managed to invent as a species is business. This is not necessarily the thing that people want to do but it's usually the shape that it takes, a person who wants to help people live healthier lives ends up with a pharmaceutical business, someone who want to explore the universe builds a space business. It allows for us to lean on the fact that everyone wants something and in the process of getting these things to them, the world turns. Building on the how important businesses are, one thing that I've heard a lot of successful entrepreneurs go on and on about is how making decisions is important. I think that making decisions is a skill and like any other skill, you get better at it the more you do it. So it seems like this is something we should have more of right?

Humans are very versatile creatures. Our ability to believe in things, to want things, combined with how when we want something, we organize ourselves in a way that allows us to eventually get the thing makes me think that some of these roles are actually beneath us. We need to optimize for getting people who can make decisions. This is problematic though because a lot people making decisions right now never know which decisions to make. It takes a significant amount of time to learn enough about how something works to be able to make good decisions sustainably. Making a good decision is an instinct more than anything, you can just smell a bad decision when you know enough about a certain area. Now how do you get enough knowledge about something without doing the grunt work for a long time?

Maybe we don't, maybe we just need to be okay with doing some amount of grunt work. Maybe we should just do something, not because we were trained to do it, not because it's in our job description but purely because it needs to get done. A significant portion of this will result in bad decisions, which will cause pain. This may be a bit contrarian but I don't think we should optimize too much to get only right decisions. If there was no pain, we would never know what we want, we would never know to change anything and as a result we wouldn't even be here asking ourselves these questions, we would be content with living in caves and dying at 30. We have to be okay with some amount of pain and start treating it not as a death sentence, but as a signal. A signal that either something needs to change, or that something is not fully understood.

Now, before this gets too Sci-fi, let me get to my point about work. I think how people interact with their own businesses needs and is going to be more conversational. I think a chat interface where you get to query data about your business and at the same time action changes to how things are done is the way to do things. It cuts through all the noise. Imagine if you could know about a challenge that a client in your system is facing via chat, imagine if you could see that trend number that you were looking for by yourself without any of the unsolicited opinions from the 5 analysts that it would normally take to get to you. All that needs to happen is a decision.

This removes a lot of barriers to doing things that I think there are now. Currently there are so many things you need to do to get into a profession. You have to have the grades for it, you have to spend an egregious amount of time learning so that you get the papers for it then you have to surround yourself with the people in that industry enough for you to get noticed. Only one of those things seems even remotely necessary for me, I'll let you figure out which. But I think more people should be able to do more things with less buy in. When doing something becomes cheaper, and easier, more people do it, and going back to the business point above, there will be more of them around which makes the economy better and although this is not the solution to life's problems, at least everything else becomes easier to deal with.

This is something that I've been thinking about for a while and it helps me get excited about the future and our place in it.