The Work Ai Can't Do

There's a big ugly elephant in the room. Actually, it's a data center. Word on the street is, we're heading for job market collapse—for a time when people are no longerneededfor the roles that employed them over years or decades. And while the timing and scale of that shift are unknown, there's one thing we can bank on: our social contracts with work are being challenged and reconsidered. My job is to help people pursue and scale mutually life-giving work, so I've been thinking a lot about what a mess this could be. I also feel entirely certain that there are things everyone can do today to make this shift the greatest gift of their lives. Here's where I am with all of it: When we lose a work role—as anyone who has left a job, been fired, or started their careers over in mid-life well know—there is a grief associated with the loss of that identity. Theself, as we have constructed it in our minds, dies and we need to construct a new one. This can be very powerful but challenging ground to walk, as it's when many realize their self-perceived worth was wrapped up in that role. The unbecoming is de-stabilizing. With AI's capacity assuming an overwhelming breadth of roles that humans once played, we may soon be looking at a collective identity death (and mental health crisis) on an unprecedented scale. In the preface of this great unbecoming, we could sound the alarms, rally for universal basic income and cede into a Wall-E-esque dystopia. We could celebrate, as many AI yay-sayers do, that soon we won't have to workat all. Or, we could fight like hell to resist the tech and keep the status quo. One could argue the standard western model of work is relatively positive. We can't ignore the challenges of alternative economies and the wide scale poverty commonplace in many regions across the globe. Still, I would argue that it's far from ideal. In essence, we have an array of roles to choose from, each of which make our societyrunlike a machine. In our youth, we're encouraged to decide what we're going tobe. To choose which lever in the machine we will pull. As we near adulthood, we're expected to receive an education—a set of instructions—to shape our minds tofitthat role. As we assume a role and enter the workforce, what wedobecomes part of our identity, but for many, it's like slipping on a jacket. Most will still consider their jobs expendable and separate from their personal lives. This has always felt wrong to me. For a long time I searched for a mission or dharma as if it were a skillset to learn. I was obsessed with the quest, certification hoarding, and emulating others, only to find it's something that comes from the soul. Dharma is not a garment we slip on but something we knit together from our very nature, our fascinations, and the path we've walked before now. It is honed and expanded by the learning and developing of skills that call to us naturally. Francis Weller summed it up beautifully inThe Wild Edge of Sorrow: 'We have gone from being seen as valuable to the community, a carrier of gifts, to having to earn a living. No one asks, 'What is the gift you carry in your soul? What have you brought with you into the heart of the village?' We long to feel cosmically significant, that it matters that we are here and that we make a difference… The absence of this remains as a persistent grief in our psyches. We have become spiritually unemployed.' I like to imagine a world where everyone is taught to seekspiritual employmentfrom the start. Where all are shown how to pursue a vocation upon their deepest held gifts, whether that be dreaming, communicating, mothering, teaching or anything else. Many would argue this world is a pipe dream becausesome BODY has to do the jobs that keep society running. Well, for the first time in history, we're faced with the possibility that they don't. That scares the hell out of me, but it also makes me wonder: If machine is destined to take all of the roles that itcan, what other choice do we have but to build upon what itcan't—to reach into the deepest layers of our animate consciousness and invite what we find there tolead our lives? The way I see it, every individual who finds their lives unraveling at the hands of machine has a critical choice: let your devices and algorithms draw you deeper into anesthesia or build something meaningful and deeply human. We can flounder and fight or we can get very quiet and heed the call, as Mary Oliver says 'restive and uprising,' that was there all along. This is not an invitation to an idealistic utopia. Selling something that is a piece of your soul is vulnerable and gritty and cringe. Metamorphosis, as art, is ugly before it's beautiful. But the goal of pursuing mutually life-giving work is not ease—it's wholeheartedness. It's feeling whole-heartedly committed to everything you do. Because you chose it and you continue to choose it. You might be thinking—well, you're missing the point. My 'gifts' can now be done by Ai. Well, just because Aicando something doesn't mean it's what humans are buying. Humans know soul. They can smell it, feel it, and find it because it speaks to their own. And those of us who are alive and alert and present to reality will always move toward it. The reason clients tell me they were drawn to my brand work is because of thesoulfulnature of the process and product. I'm not an anti-Ai purist. But everything I do ishuman-first. I use my heart and my brain toseepeople and sometimes bring machine in to help with organization and articulation. The reason they choose me is that my offering is built from soul and that speaks to their own. You can create that too. If you're sitting with fear that your job is going to disappear, I wonder if you could start building your own on something more sturdy than a job description. Seek spiritual employment instead. Look at what you've always been good at, what youcareabout more than anything else, what soft skills and developed skills you hold. Create an offering that feeds both yourself and the world. You're a pollinator at heart, and you've got to start somewhere.