For the first time in history, there are five generations working together in the modern workforce: Silent Generation (1925 to 1945), Boomers (1946 to 1964), Gen X (1965 to 1980), Millennials (1981 to 2000), and Gen Z (2001 to 2020). Each of these generations has a vastly different formative experience, and their views on “appropriate” behavior vary greatly.

Digital media, especially social media and video platforms, act like modern-day digital drugs, offering fast, easy dopamine hits.” Dopamine is a neurotransmitter that plays a key role in the brain’s reward, motivation, pleasure, attention, and motor systems. The very technologies that have become a part of our daily lives are also making us dopamine junkies. We are being hacked by persuasive design and it has resulted in a loss of agency and negatively impacted workplace behaviors.

Much of the tech sector RIF has been driven by an essentialist mindset that AI is a panacea that will radically reshape the labor force. Who needs humans, we have AI - and you don’t need to be nice to it! It turns out, AI isn’t good at a lot of things and is suspiciously unreliable. Part of the reason is that since 2022 learning models have been regularly ingesting recycled AI slop. Yes, your AI is drinking its own dirty bathwater and it is leading to an increase in model collapse. There is a new trend among companies paying top dollar for specialists who can identify and fix AI mistakes.

We now face a situation where the pandemic exacerbated preexisting issues of isolation, and then RTO policies and weak leadership forced individuals into a work environment that many deeply resent. In other words, how to make a sad person sadder.

Employers can only wait so long, and then they have to make a decision to move forward on their large enterprise implementations and integrations before their competitors gain an advantage. There will be pockets where LLMs can certainly contribute to knowledge work, productivity, software development, customer support automation, and some aspects of content generation. And even with generative AI tools in these areas, you still need a knowledgeable human being to make judgments and call out the hallucinations and noise.