Our Work Norms are 4000 Years Old and We Need to Update Them for AI—Here's How to Do It

How long have we done work, more or less? My video up there refers to Ea-nāṣir and his copper deal. I am that nerd. The point is we’ve been doing business and work for at least ~4k years. Having spent significant time in a society transitioning out of hunter-gatherer mode I’d argue we’ve been doing meaningful work for much much longer than that.

But the years aren’t really the point. The point is that we have had for all that time a reasonably reliable way to assess quality of work. We were right there. We saw the work.

For most of human history, asking “Where are you?” made no sense.

Well, not anymore. Just as we’ve disinter-mediated work geographically since 2000, AI is starting to disinter-mediate the semantic meaning of work, but AI is phenomenally good at producing semantically meaningful text. And it turns out a lot of knowledge work (which has multiplied since 2000) revolves around text.

And so our categories of work are starting to break down. The way we think about work is starting to change. We’re starting to doubt ourselves. Is it good? Is my colleague using AI? What if I do use AI? Who will know? So many secret thoughts. And for so many workers these are thoughts that are scary to voice unless their leadership is aggressively pushing on AI-friendly culture. The stakes are high, because the relationship between AI usage and job security is fraught.

So in that world what do we do? How do we restore meaning to work? It’s one of the most important questions in the world today, but I don’t think we’re talking about it with a real framework that’s consistent.

And I think that starts with acknowledging where we’ve been: we’ve always had intuitive ways of knowing whether work was good quality. So we’ve never had to complain about it or define it before. Ea-nāṣir complained about his copper, but he didn’t doubt the quality bar. He complained precisely because the quality bar is known. That’s how it’s been throughout history: we’ve been able to know by how someone talks if they know their domain. We’ve been able to know how they gained confidence in a decision because we see them speak, write, meet, and annotate. We have known if a person was doing work of high value because we could trust that an achievement was done by them.

These things are not true anymore, and we don’t know what to do. And that’s why I wrote this. I want us to have a framework for re-forging norms at work that allow us to use AI constructively. I think that’s one of the most important things we can be doing right now. I’d love your take on the frame below. Let me know if it resonates!