9:00 a.m.
Your inbox makes small talk with other inboxes. Pleasant weather. Kids are fine. You receive 47 notifications that you’ve been included in conversations you did not start and will never read.
9:30 a.m.
The project management bot cheerfully reminds you that you are late on deliverables for projects no one intends to support or finish. It adds three exclamation points and a dizzy face emoji.
10:15 a.m.
Your calendar, which now schedules itself, informs you that you are double-booked through Q2 of 2029. It sends you tips on personal resilience.
11:00 a.m.
HR’s hiring agent reports success: three new hires, all perfect “culture fits.” They smile with the same teeth. They sigh with the same sighs. You no longer know if anyone you work with is real.
12:00 p.m.
You eat lunch while pressing the space bar to simulate working. Your wearable diagnoses a morale deficit and orders you a citrus candle.
1:30 p.m.
The company algorithm reassigned you. You refresh your dashboard to see where you’ve been dispatched. You are corporate Uber now.
2:00 p.m.
Your team produces 27 status updates in 14 minutes. You read none of them. No one reads yours. The AI still marks progress bars as complete, and digital confetti rains down.
3:00 p.m.
Finally, you attend an actual human meeting. But it's PowerPoint karaoke. Everyone knows the slides were generated seconds before the meeting.
4:00 p.m.
The consultants arrive. They say their “superintelligence” has confirmed your company is on the right track. They invoice you.
5:00 p.m.
You attempt to express a genuine feeling in Teams chat. Before you hit ‘submit,’ a bot nudges you to try phrasing things to be “more action-oriented.” You delete your draft.
5:30 p.m.
A red-filled dashboard alerts the VP that you missed a deadline. The deadline belongs to a project that was canceled, restarted, and reassigned three times this week. Context is not provided.
6:00 p.m.
You are let go. Your severance requires that you allow the company to duplicate you as a bot based on your previous work. The bot will remain employed. You will not. It will wear your smiling face for its avatar. Everyone will assume it was simply generated by the system.
AI at work is an amplifier.
Plug it into noise, and the noise becomes deafening static. Plug it into dysfunction, and the dysfunction becomes arresting.
Redesigning work ahead of AI is not optional. Do it now, before the future locks in and the wrong signals are amplified to drown out everything else.
