Workplaces used to be places where you made deep and lasting bonds. I remember a sentence from a movie, ‘You spend more than half of your life with the people you work with’, and I think that matters a lot. You develop meaningful relationships, sometimes even find your spouses or make friends for life in your work places. You build relationships in the work place mostly through the following.
- participating in gossip at the water filler
- asking for help in solving a problem
- bonding over shared interests.
I’d say roughly the last 2 take up up to 80% of relationship development in the workplace.
Now that companies are behind efficiency, encouraging employees to use more AI. And with employees also chasing AI to not be left out and be more efficient, I think there is a drop in the amount of work place relationships you build and the vulnerability that goes around.
- When you ask someone for help at work, you show vulnerability and that leads to building bonds.
- But when you start to ask AI for everything and anything, you lose that chance to show vulnerability and build a bond.
Of course there are other reasons apart from efficiency that make it worth wile to be dependent on Ai instead of humans, such as their quickness, AI not judging and so on.
But I’m much more curious about what happens to human relationships and bonds when you start replacing those tiny parts of human to human communication such as help seeking with AI.
And even more interested in the second order effects that can have on the organizations themselves.