Join me next Monday May 26 at 6pm CET / 12 noon EST / 9am PST 830pm India etc for my next #gerdtalk livestream event on: DIGITAL LABOR: AI AGENTS & AUTOMATION: Will Super-Smart Machines and AGI replace humans? LinkedIn or YT below. No registration required. You can comment via live chat or come in to contribute via video (by invitation only)!

---

Salesforce defines Digital Labor as “A digital workforce of intelligent AI agents that augments the human workforce, and transforms the way work gets done”. The meme is going bonkers in the tech world, right now: Swarms of super-smart AI agents poised to tackle ALL the routine work that once bogged down human time and productivity. From drafting simple contracts and NDAs to interpreting scans and MRIs, hundreds of vendors are painting a utopia where drudge tasks vanish, productivity soars, and boardrooms can celebrate a future with with a lot less “expensive” (and pesky) humans. General Intelligence / AGI is the goal: machines that are better at almost all human tasks – and faster and cheaper!

Yet my hunch is that behind the glossy demos and the “frontier firm” pitches lies a disturbing techno-optimistic reductionism: let's swap flesh-and-blood employees for lines of code, automate oversight, ethics and authenticity into oblivion, forego anything that requires human efforts – and watch more profits roll in.

But in REAL LIFE / IRL many so-called routines or commodity tasks still demand embodied judgment, social nuance, holistic understanding and contextual awareness; capabilities that – being devoid of agency and consciousness – no algorithm can reliably emulate (I know this is a contentious point:)

The dream of wholesale human replacement feels more like a sales pitch, or a Wall-E episode than a panacea. But, let's have a look: what will that change, and when? And let's ask who benefits when “the full automation of the economy” becomes more than a Silicon Valley headline. If real intelligence is indeed emotional, social, embodied and holistic, then “machine smartness” will remain a power tool, a servant. VERY useful, yes – but still unthinking, unaware and uncaring (and hence utterly dangerous to give any real-life control to).

Also, we must remember that the race toward AGI isn't really about business innovation; rather, it increasingly looks more like an arms race in which investors and super-funded startup CEOs dream of human labor as an obsolete line item in a pitch deck. It's about power and money, not about human flourishing.

So, before our jobs—and our LIVES—become disposable commodities, I think it’s time to insist that the spoils of “post-labor prosperity” (if there is such a thing) be shared, not annexed or hoarded. How can we resist this digital coup against the very concept of work – and life as we know it? How can we remind our new AI wranglers that consciousness, not code, remains uniquely human?

JOIN ME (yes it's free:)

FOR CONTEXT: