Is AI Going to Turn Us All Into Middle Managers?

How is AI changing the way we work? This week on Galaxy Brain, Charlie Warzel is joined by Johnathan and Melissa Nightingale, two experts in management and leadership training. They discuss how chatbots and AI agents are winding their way through the workforce, offering a firsthand view of how companies are (and aren’t) adopting AI tools. The conversation covers the gap between AI hype and what’s actually happening in offices. It also touches on how overreliance on AI tools may be making bosses worse at their jobs, and how work may be one of the last bastions of sustained social connection in a period of cultural alienation and isolation. Get more from your favorite Atlantic voices when you subscribe. You’ll enjoy unlimited access to Pulitzer-winning journalism, from clear-eyed analysis and insight on breaking news to fascinating explorations of our world. Atlantic subscribers also get access to exclusive subscriber audio in Apple Podcasts. Subscribe today at TheAtlantic.com/Listener. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:19Speaker 01

  When was the last time you indulged your desires, felt true Range Rover refinement? The last time you felt total serenity, total confidence, no matter the terrain? Limitless, effortless, peerless? How far can Range Rover take you? Range Rover, designed for distinction.

• 0:37Speaker 02

  It turns out that humans really care about doing work they believe in with people they care about. And when you hollow those things out, people have these emotional responses to it that that I don't see predicted by the marketing materials from the AI companies.

• 0:57Charlie Warzel?

  I'm Charlie Warzel and this is Galaxy Brain, a show where today, we're going to talk about work. Trying to talk about jobs right now, how we work, what that work means, what the future of white collar work looks like, it is just extremely difficult. We all seem to be situated in this very confusing moment, one that I think is captured very well by my Atlantic colleague Josh Tarangle's story. It ran with this rather ominous headline, "America Isn't Ready For What AI Will Do To Jobs." The piece is great and you should totally seek it out, but the illustration of the piece, I found quite apt. It's of this man, he's in a tree, his eyes are two dollar signs, and he's smiling while holding

• 1:38Charlie Warzel?

  a chainsaw and cutting into the branch that's supporting his own weight. This, in many ways, is the vibe of 2026. This feeling that this certain subset of people motivated by profit and efficiency are conducting an experiment that, if it succeeds, is not going to just rewire the economy forever, but change the very nature and essence of labor. For the last few years since the arrival of chatbots, the AI conversation around work has been some The tools are useful in automating busywork and drudgery, and they're getting better. And so what does that mean for jobs? Well, AI executives have been issuing dire warnings. In 2025, for example, Dario Amade, the CEO of the AI company Anthropic,

• 2:23Charlie Warzel?

  told Axios that AI could drive unemployment up 10% to 20% in the next one to five years and wipe out half of all entry-level white-collar jobs. Meanwhile, those who are running companies seem quite eager to unleash this technology on knowledge work, labor force be damned. They're driven by profit incentives and a good amount of FOMO. AI is the future. Get on board or be left behind. What's your AI strategy? In some cases, the fastest way to show results is to simply reduce headcount. Workers, especially young workers, are concerned. According to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the unemployment rate for college graduates ages 22 to 27 ballooned to 5.6% at the end of last year. And as the New York Times notes, for those who are unemployed, more than 40% held jobs

• 3:08Charlie Warzel?

  that do not typically require college degrees, which is the highest level since 2020. You can feel the weirdness in the economy right now. This fear of a kind of job market stagnation, but no exact sense of what is happening on the ground, and how much of all of this is actually AI-driven. Simply put, there are huge fears here that AI is not only changing the way we might do our jobs, but it might be changing how we get them, whether we can keep them. AI executives are out here arguing that most of us, no matter the job, are destined to become middle managers for a host of AI agents. And you can take that with a grain of salt as just another tech CEO prognostication.

• 3:49Charlie Warzel?

  But if there's any truth to it, it would represent a massive change. And the concerns go well beyond the economy into something much more existential. What does it mean to be a human in a world that all of a sudden doesn't value human labor in the same way? So are we all destined to become middle managers? Is AI really ripping through the workforce? What is the value of work in this strange economy? And how can people survive, maintain dignity, human connection? All of that in a world where decision makers driven by dollar signs are pruning the trees for every possible efficiency, even if we're all just sitting on the branches? Jonathan and Melissa Nightingale are here to help me answer some of these thorny questions.

• 4:31Charlie Warzel?

  They're the founders of Raw Signal, a leadership and management training firm. Jonathan and Melissa have worked with thousands of executives and managers in companies across tech and other industries, and they are keen observers of the ways that modern white color work and workplace communication is broken. But they also offer this clear vision of how work can stay human and humane. They join me now to talk it all through.

• 4:58Charlie Warzel?

  Melissa and Jonathan, welcome to Galaxy Break.

• 5:01Speaker 02

  Thank you.

• 5:02Speaker 04

  Thanks, Charlie.

• 5:02Speaker 02

  It's lovely to be here.

• 5:04Charlie Warzel?

  So it is a weird time in the economy, especially in America. We're in this low hire, low fire labor market. There's this very amorphous and pressing fear right now about artificial intelligence taking or threatening jobs, especially entry level jobs. And the labor market just looks increasingly grim and feels increasingly grim to younger workers. The vibes, they're off, they're not good. I wanted to start just by asking you all, you're talking to businesses, to people, you're on the ground. What are people telling you about the vibes right now? What, report on the vibes for me.

• 5:44Speaker 04

  I love reporting.

• 5:45Speaker 02

  The vibes is such a great place to start because like, I don't know if you remember, but like, it wasn't so many years ago, the companies were appointing chief vibes officers.

• 5:53Speaker 04

  Do you remember this? Like in 2022?

• 5:56Charlie Warzel?

  I don't really.

• 5:56Speaker 04

  Okay. There's like very weird future of work moment, right? Where everybody was like a future of work thought leader in 2022. And the New York Times reported, they had like a big story about chief vibes officers.

• 6:07Speaker 02

  The new jobs of the new economy.

• 6:09Charlie Warzel?

  Man, I missed out on that. I would love to be chief vibes officer.

• 6:13Speaker 04

  But that was like the new hot title.

• 6:14Speaker 02

  Because like in 2022, like everybody was fighting. Like junior engineers were getting, you know, 100, 200, $300,000 offer packages because like, everybody was starved for this tech talent. And it was, that was the story of the moment was wow. How much worker empowerment there is.

• 6:30Speaker 04

  And so we're not like, we're not trying to make like the vibes sad, but it is worth starting with like, where were the vibes as we head into like, where are the vibes now? So 2022, still relatively hot labor market, still a lot of competition for talent, particularly junior talent, particularly junior engineering talent.

• 6:47Speaker 02

  And you could tell that like senior leaders were pissed off about that. It was too expensive, these people were too entitled, right? Like Chief Vibes Officer makes good buzz, but like you could tell in early 2022 that like, this was about to get some pushback.

• 7:04Speaker 04

  Remember, this was like the earliest version of return to office mandates. People saying like, we went home, we did amazing work at home, like, why do we have to go back? And also like, if you make me go back, I have another $300,000 job offer.

• 7:14Speaker 02

  Just walk across the street.

• 7:15Speaker 04

  Lined up tomorrow.

• 7:16Speaker 02

  Right. It's funny because people talk about AI and all the layoffs and there's been, you know, half a million layoffs in the last several years and in technology workers and stuff like that. Those layoffs started before the first ChatGPT release.

• 7:28Speaker 04

  What it did was reset the market, right? It recalibrated, like you had folks who had that sort of early engineering role and they got a little bit more skittish about, should I leave to go across the street? Or should I stay put? Should I feel grateful that I have a job, that I have this opportunity? And you started to see people feeling a little bit more nervous and a little bit more uncomfortable around the market overall.

• 7:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, these days like AI has sucked all the oxygen out of the room and people are like, oh, that's, that's all driven by AI. I mean, first of all, November ChatGPT couldn't count how many Rs there were in strawberry. That's not a reason to turn your whole business upside down. But also the layoffs happened six months before that too. Like it's been part of a pattern of executives in some organizations reasserting power and making sure that like especially junior workers lose that sense of entitlement. I think vibes wise, that's happened, like they succeeded in that.

• 8:16Charlie Warzel?

  It was such an interesting moment. I mean, I, I, I wrote, uh, back in, I think it was 2021, but it might've been 2022 in that time period of a hot labor market, also of, as you say, like some, some real worker empowerment. I remember writing this piece that was like, do people even want a career, right? Like, do the young, like the Gen Z people coming up, do they even want a career? You know, they're like, Questioning the idea of like the standard thing because there's just so many different options and maybe I don't want to work the way that my parents worked and to compare that feeling to now where it's like, could I even get in the door to have a career? Or am I going to have to, you know, figure out something else completely different? I think that that's extremely stark in terms of that shift.

• 8:57Charlie Warzel?

  What are people telling you on the ground now in terms of this moment? Obviously, there is that sense of precarity with workers, but in terms of that force of generative AI, how are people feeling about it?

• 9:12Speaker 04

  Jonathan, I both come from tech, right? We've both been working in tech since the first dot com boom, all the way on through. And we work with a lot of organizations with tech leaders. And what we're hearing from folks is like, on the one hand, you sign up for tech as your industry and as your career, like you like working on the cool new stuff, right? Like it is, we are, we are an industry that loves our toys. We love innovation. We love sort of like taking things out and experimenting. Sometimes they last, sometimes they don't last. But like, as an industry, if that doesn't get you let up, you picked the wrong job. But what we're hearing from a lot of folks is that the, the day to day of we're playing with these tools is no longer lining up to what are we supposed to be doing here? And like that playing with the tools has become sort of an end into itself. And a lot of folks are finding like, we're using them, but I don't know, what are we running toward?

• 9:57Charlie Warzel?

  Do you get the sense that this is, if we're going down the chain, this is executives high up on top, see a thing, they're reading a lot about it, there's a lot of hype, they feel, okay, more than anything, I have to make sure that we do not get left behind here. And then the sort of manager, middle manager layer is feeling that it's forced on them? Or is there sort of, you know, broadly speaking, like a lot of enthusiasm, but there's just not enough time to figure it out?

• 10:28Speaker 04

  All of the above. Yeah. Right? Like we met a lady who's like a really skilled executive and she was working in an organization where she's like, I came in as a fixer, right? Like my whole job was fixer and I was really excited about it. Like the opportunity was cool, came in, was doing the work and starting to see the impact of that work. And she's like, and then my CEO got really excited about GPT. And I started sending things that were like strategic plans for my division, for my department. And what started coming back from my CEO, who I report directly into, Wasn't from him. Like, he hadn't, it was clear, he hadn't read any of the plans that I was putting forward. He just pushed them through and said, like, generate an email in response to this.

• 11:12Speaker 04

  She's like, I went from being like, so excited about the turnaround potential for this business, for this organization, and for my department and team, to feeling really sad. Just having a very hard time figuring out, like, what am I doing? If I'm putting in all this effort.

• 11:30Speaker 02

  When you look at a story like that, that's a management failure. It can take one of a couple of flavors. One thing you can say is, oh, that person's work is now useless because GPT replaces it well enough.

• 11:41Speaker 04

  Right.

• 11:41Speaker 02

  And so that person should have just been sort of given a firm handshake and a goodbye package and sent out the door. Or you can say GPT can't replace human ingenuity at the senior levels and whatever. And so like, there's a real dereliction there because you had a motivated, engaged senior employee and you burnt them. In either case, that's a management failure. That's a thing that's coming up a fair bit is that people, people look at what code generation can do in LLMs today, and they sort of, they do it well naturally. Well, naturally, in time, it will write good poems. Well, naturally, in time,

• 12:18Speaker 04

  Right.

• 12:18Speaker 02

  it will be your accountant. And well, naturally, in time, it will manage as well or better than most people do. It's just this like, this leap, this linear leap that is not borne out by what we're seeing on the ground today.

• 12:31Charlie Warzel?

  Do you feel like that that's a broader trend of, especially on, on the executive layer? And I'm not trying to paint people as caricatures here, but this idea that, especially with these higher, more vision, strategy jobs, where there is a lot of busy work involved in that, in that sense of, of communication that, you know, what I've heard is that AI is like, is a perfect, like, CEO, right? Like, it could be, like, it's just sort of like broad, broad pronouncements, you know, being, being able to speak with maybe more confidence than is earned or deserved, right?

• 13:08Speaker 02

  Incredible executive presence.

• 13:09Charlie Warzel?

  Yeah, a great presence in that sense. And so naturally, you know, people higher up on the end of the, of the management chain might be enamored with it or the, you know, the ability of it. Do you feel like CEOs are like overly AI-pilled right now?

• 13:25Speaker 02

  I think they're a vulnerable group.

• 13:28Speaker 02

  I think like one of the challenges with being a CEO is that even an incredibly effective CEO shouldn't know more about every function in their business than the people working those functions do, right? If you're, if you're an expert engineer and you become a CEO, you might know a lot about engineering.

• 13:44Speaker 04

  But over time, you'll actually know less than the people who are typing on keyboards all day.

• 13:48Speaker 02

  And your head of sales should know more about sales than you do. Your head of marketing should know more about marketing than you do, right? Like that's part of the job of building a senior team is to make sure those people are one, like lighting you on fire with great ideas, and two, are credible leaders for their own functions in a way that you couldn't be because a person can't know everything about everything. And so like, it's tempting from that seat to flatten a lot of that work and to say, if an AI can do that work 80% as well, maybe I have to spend some more compute over there in order to get the result I want? Do I even need a marketing department? Do I even need an engineering department? Do I even need a finance department? They're vulnerable to it if they don't hold on to a sort of core like go-touch-grass reality, which is that it takes a long time to learn some things and human judgment is valuable.

• 14:33Speaker 00

  But first, a quick break.

• 14:38Speaker 00

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• 15:11Speaker 01

  When was the last time you indulged your desires, felt true Range Rover refinement? When was the last time you drove in total serenity, the outside world reduced to a hush? The last time you were confident on uncertain terrain? The last journey that made you feel at home, conveniently connected at every step? In a Range Rover, pioneering innovation meets leading-edge luxury to make every drive an occasion. Limitless, effortless, pureless. How far will you let it take you? Range Rover, designed for distinction.

• 15:44Charlie Warzel?

  Where do you all think we are in terms of adoption? Because again, for someone on the outside who's not, you know, speaking to managers and the rank and file, you know, types of employees at all times, it's hard to get a good sense. But how much have these tools already changed what is happening day in, day out versus how much of it is that feeling of like, I need to be doing this. This is something that we need to have. There is like the, you know, the FOMO element. Where do you see the balance there?

• 16:11Speaker 02

  Certainly, among the groups that we work with, people in engineering roles have been the most curious about it and in some cases, the most compelled to engage with it. You definitely have people who are very credulous, who are playing with it a lot, who feel like they're, they're getting super productive about it. We're starting to see studies about how those people are burning themselves out. Right? Those people are really struggling because they're orchestrating so many bots that they never want to close their laptop because they think they're getting this dopamine hit from productivity. They're not necessarily deepening their skills. They're just doing a bunch of stuff. But like there, you see a ton of adoption.

• 16:42Speaker 04

  We're starting to see the, the fingerprints of AI adoption mandates in contexts where it makes no damn sense. We have a client organization that was building technology to respond to bots infiltrating contact forms on websites.

• 16:56Charlie Warzel?

  Okay.

• 16:57Speaker 04

  Because so many people were having their agent basically like, go reach out to this organization. We're trying to get this work done. Can you go like, figure out a quote for this thing?

• 17:05Charlie Warzel?

  Yeah.

• 17:06Speaker 04

  Go write them with a description of what we're trying to get done, have it come back. But the cycle times are considerably longer in part because the context that you can anticipate a human responding to it needing just isn't there. And so you end up with like, it's like, it's meant to save a step, but it causes three more. And like, we've all had the experience of somebody sent like a junior person sending a shitty email and being like, fuck, I gotta go unwind that. Right? Like, I gotta go unwind that. You sent an email and like, it makes no damn sense. And now I've got 30 people in the organization going and running and chasing a thing that like-

• 17:33Speaker 02

  Or you sent it to a client and now I gotta go- Apologize.

• 17:36Speaker 04

  But imagine that multiplied across like many workforces right now where you've got like a lot of like communication and requests flowing that just missed an important key step before they went out the door. And so there's a bunch of like weird context and cleanup that's taking longer than the original initial task would have taken to just do the damn thing.

• 17:56Speaker 02

  And there's this rigidity forming too, which is like worth fighting against.

• 18:00Speaker 04

  Right.

• 18:00Speaker 02

  You'll have people farming everything out to GPT, even really obvious ways, right? You get emails from a colleague and you're like, this is not what you sound like. This is obviously GPT and what am I meant to do with the fact that you didn't bother to write this email, right?

• 18:15Speaker 04

  Absolutely.

• 18:15Speaker 02

  And, and then like the alternative is to say, well, screw it. I will never, I will never let GPT do that. It's an insult when somebody does it to me. I'm not going to do that to other people. And from that place is sort of entrenched and say, I refuse to engage with these tools. And then you, you're putting your refusal up against management pressure and like it's driving conflict that isn't very helpful.

• 18:34Charlie Warzel?

  When I hear, oh, these agents are like, you know, filling out these contact Forbes is creating a whole bunch of extra work. The guy who's been listening to people in Silicon Valley talk about this technology for a very long time says, yes, well, their solution to that is you need agents on both ends because it's having agents on just one end is not balanced. You know, there's this way in which I can see that, you know, people are creating, it's a very classic tech thing to create a bunch of problems and then offer a technological solution to the problem that you created that'll add to, to more problems down the line. I also think though, that what I want to highlight there is the way in which this creates these asymmetries and builds these little cracks and pieces of distrust.

• 19:19Charlie Warzel?

  You know, that, that seems like something that feels really important in the context of all of this going forward, that. If you are somebody who cares a lot about what you do and puts a lot of effort into these things, and then you have a group of people who may also care, but they use these tools and there's not this standardization of work output, and you see somebody respond to your email with something generated, and you go, and you know, I think it's really interesting that it creates that that fracture based off of how, you know, AI-pilled you are, or how excited you are about the technology. And that feels like it could, it could be a bigger problem than I think people are thinking about right now.

• 20:00Speaker 04

  We're seeing that play out across technology right now, where you've got folks who feel like, maybe, maybe you're being incredibly efficient, and you've got like 12 agents working for you, and you're getting a ton of stuff done. And I think, wow, what a go-getter. Or I think you're really fucking rude. And like, you don't give a shit about your work or the impact to like, my organization on you sending garbage across as a transmission.

• 20:21Speaker 02

  Isn't that interesting? Like, not from a like, culture war, like, red team versus blue team shit, but like, why, why can so many people nod along to this idea of like, oh yeah, when you get a GPT email, that feels rude. Like, that feels like the person didn't care, right? Like, I thought these agents were supposed to be like, solving all kinds of problems. I thought they were like, more talented. They're passing the LSATs. They're like, you know, they're doctors, they're therapists, they're whatever. Like, why would we receive it as rude? It turns out that humans really care about doing work they believe in with people they care about. And when you hollow those things out, people have these emotional responses to it that, that I don't see predicted by the marketing materials from the AI companies.

• 21:06Speaker 04

  And the hyper rationalists will fall short on this one every time, because like, being more efficient should like, it goes, right?

• 21:12Speaker 02

  You ought.

• 21:12Speaker 04

  You ought. You ought to be excited about being 10 times more productive than you were yesterday. You ought to be excited that your colleagues sent you an email that they didn't spend any time on, because like, you also don't have to spend any time on reading it or consuming it. That should be exciting.

• 21:26Charlie Warzel?

  You're both management and leadership trainers, which means your job is, you know, ostensibly to try to make people better bosses, right? And I want to ground some of this in asking, what makes a good manager?

• 21:43Charlie Warzel?

  Or what makes a good middle manager? What are those qualities there?

• 21:47Speaker 04

  We have bosses who show up in program and they're like, I am a good manager because my team likes me. We're like, wrong. I am a good manager because like, my team is happy. We're like, wrong. Happy is like an impermanent state, right?

• 22:00Speaker 02

  And you can't take custody for other people's emotions?

• 22:02Speaker 04

  No. Fundamentally, you are a good manager if you are making your team more effective.

• 22:08Speaker 02

  And effective feels really mercenary, but it isn't. Because it turns out, as you get deeper into this, you learn that the best way to build an effective team is to see them as individuals, to align their personal motivations and aspirations and sense of mastery, the things they want to learn, their curiosity, with the things your organization is trying to get done. It turns out that like, that only happens if there's a high level of psychological safety, if they're able to take risks, if they're able to talk to you about their struggles.

• 22:36Speaker 04

  If you're able to give hard and critical feedback on the work, where it is like showing up exactly as it should and where it isn't showing up exactly as it should.

• 22:44Speaker 02

  And if they see you engaging as an authentic leader, they don't need you to be perfect, but they need you to not be bullshit. Right? It's an important part of how they cohere as a team and how they find anything that you have to say remotely credible. But many people in management roles lack those skills. And if you're like, wouldn't that make work terrible for a lot of people? Yes.

• 23:06Charlie Warzel?

  There, there we go. Part of the reason I ask is because it seems in this AI conversation, right? That the term management is a skill set that AI companies seem to want to impose on all of us, right? Recently, the co-founder of Anthropic, Jack Clark, went on a podcast, he's talking about the way that chatbots and increasingly these coding agents are, you know, going to be sent off to accomplish these tasks. And there's going to be all of what we're talking about, right? These things happening on behalf of us, goose chases, all kinds of stuff. And had this quote that I thought was striking. It's one of the reasons I wanted to have this conversation with you all, which is, he says, quote, "Everyone becomes a manager. And the thing that is increasingly limited, or the thing that's going to be the slowest part, is having good taste and intuitions about what to do next."

• 23:51Charlie Warzel?

  What do you make of that line? Everyone becomes a manager.

• 23:54Speaker 02

  It's such a shallow read on management, isn't it? Like, if you think about it, let's say he's right that like, when I fire up my Claude code instance and I say Claude, create a marketing team for me. I want a content marketer. I want somebody on social media.

• 24:08Speaker 02

  Right? Have I done it now? Can I transfer those skills over to the the humans that are still on my team? Is it the same thing? Can I just go to Tony and be like, Tony? Get Alex and Sam in a room. You got new jobs now. Here's what you're doing. Like, is that gonna work? Nobody thinks that's gonna work.

• 24:22Speaker 04

  I have to think like any model for management that doesn't come with employees who have needs and like labor and rights. Like, there's a bunch of pieces that are missing from that mental model. And either that's accidental or that's on purpose. But we should all be really concerned about a model of labor and a model of management that includes work happening without any any capacity for what the people doing that work or what the folks who are supposed to be like responsible for that output need.

• 24:52Speaker 02

  Buddy seems to know a lot about AI. I know the podcast you're talking about. It's it's cool. He's built something that's very big and seems to be changing a lot of people's lives. And I hope some of them for the better. Like, that's super neat. That's super neat. But like on management, I'm not convinced he has the range to give anybody advice on like what constitutes good management. You can build a very wealthy company and still be cooking a bunch of people inside it saying something like that. I don't know. You can call that an insult. You can call that a threat. But like, that's not that's not what management is.

• 25:24Charlie Warzel?

  Well, what's interesting is, you know, a- as you're describing what makes a good manager. And you you you pause and say, you know, this could sound mercenary, right? But what's actually involved in all of this is like the very human work of recognition of of getting to know people of of of caring, of giving a shit, right? It seems like. That idea of everyone becomes a manager, that definition from, you know, an AI executive, it pauses at the mercenary point, you know? He's with you until that moment of where you say, but then it requires all this. And part of the reason why I want to have this part of the conversation is also because

• 26:08Charlie Warzel?

  my partner, Anne Helen Peterson, and I wrote this book about the rise of remote work in 2020. We spoke to you guys a lot about that book. And one of my broader takeaways from all the reporting is that despite being in the boss layer, right? The managers, and especially middle managers, are pretty miserable. Like, just in general, just like a pretty miserable, like, you know, core of that thing. Like, maybe miserable in different and unique ways than, you know, oppressed or rank and file workers, but pretty miserable. And so when I hear that we're all going to become managers, I hear, oh, man, that's a lot of, like, task switching and a lot of, like, I'm getting incoming from two sides

• 26:53Charlie Warzel?

  of this thing, like, two groups of people are kind of converging on me. I've got these unhappy people on one side, this unhappy thing on the other side. I kind of have to figure out how to exist in this world, being pulled in 100 directions.

• 27:04Speaker 04

  Charlie, you're selling it. You're making it sound so compelling.

• 27:07Speaker 02

  Strong pitch, strong pitch.

• 27:07Charlie Warzel?

  But that, to me, is like, I don't know. I mean, does it seem as dystopian to you? Or do you just recognize this as a guy pontificating without, as you said, the, you know, the understanding?

• 27:21Speaker 04

  I mean, I think, like, we have a working mental model, like, we have a real world model for where automation takes more of the front seat on management. Amazon warehouses are a good example. Uber drivers are a good example.

• 27:35Speaker 02

  Already being managed by algorithms. The common thread there is this idea that, like, where people working in Amazon warehouses is because they can't automate that piece yet, right? And so they build all the automation around these little stations where the human stands and the humans are reaching up and reaching down. That shouldn't be our vision for the future of work. And when you listen to a lot of the people who are like, oh, everyone's going to be a manager, you're going to have this swarm of agents who's doing stuff, like, what's the end state there? That you're a team of one? And so when you try and sell me this story about, like, a billion-dollar company with one person, I'm like, think about the best times you've had at work.

• 28:12Speaker 02

  Best times. You might have had a shit boss. I get it. There's a lot of them.

• 28:15Speaker 04

  We have all had shit bosses.

• 28:16Speaker 02

  We're working as hard as we can. But like, the best times you've had at work, and I guarantee that story involves colleagues. And so when somebody tries to sell you on like, "Don't worry, you don't need colleagues anymore." I'm like, "That's... What are you doing? I understand your technology is very impressive, but like, that's a weird thing to sell."

• 28:33Speaker 04

  Unless you're annoyed at paying the junior engineers $300,000 a year, straight out of school, and then it's a very compelling sell.

• 28:42Charlie Warzel?

  There's a lot here, right? Some of these people who are talking this, some of them, yes, are people who are inside large companies right now that are building all of this, that have this workforce. So I think that argument makes a lot of sense. There's another group, though, of like, let's just say, venture capitalists, who are kind of actually on that island, right? A little bit. I mean, yes, there are plenty of people who work in some of these venture firms, no doubt. But the idea is that sort of like, life of the mind, like, I'm this tech soothsayer. And I think in some sense, there is this like, how can I push this to the furthest possible extent? And there's this idea, always, with the efficiency, right? The reason why the AI bro-type person who's saying this thing

• 29:27Charlie Warzel?

  about the excitement of the first one-person unicorn company, I think speaks to the idea of like, this is efficiency pushed to its broadest level, right? This is like, this is the cheat code for late-stage capitalism. And I think it ties, though, to this broader premise of like, how productive this stuff actually is, right? So there's this recent survey from this company called ActiveTrack, and they analyze over 10,000 workers across 376 companies, and they did it 180 days before and after AI adoption. And the thing that I think won't be surprising to a lot of people who follow this is email, up 104%, chat and messaging, up 145%,

• 30:11Charlie Warzel?

  collaboration time surged 34% to an hour a day, multitasking rose 12%. It's that classic, you know, Parkinson's Law, work expands to fill the time available for its completion type thing. What do you make of those types of numbers and the idea of productivity?

• 30:31Speaker 04

  We tell bosses all the time, like, busy is not the same as effective. Like, you can, you can run your team totally ragged in terms of having them chase every idea that seems like a good idea. But like, if that's not what we're here to do, you're wasting their time and your own.

• 30:44Speaker 02

  The maximalist argument's always so weird, right? Here's the thing you could do. The thing you could do is say to your team, this is a cool tool. We should figure out where we can apply it.

• 30:53Speaker 04

  Just where is there an annoying problem within the organization that you wish someone would fix for you? Where is there like an internal tooling thing that would be so cool to have? And get a thing out of your way in your workflow? Great, let's go build that.

• 31:06Charlie Warzel?

  Right, software size problem.

• 31:08Speaker 02

  That can be the end of a sentence. Like, it doesn't have to be, and then we fire everyone. Like, it doesn't, you can just, and like, they're like, well, but if all your competitors are cutting to the bone and outsourcing all their sort of, you know, friendships to ChatGPT or whatever, then like, you're gonna have margin pressure and you're gonna have to do the same thing. And I'm like, man, maybe, but like, it turns out that creative, resourceful, adaptable humans are good at some shit. And that like an LLM, which however amazing you might find it to be, is trained on yesterday, is at some point going to run into problems inventing tomorrow, right? And that like, that's a thing people can do. And then tomorrow it'll train on it.

• 31:50Speaker 02

  I will bet on people, and again, not like, not as a, a team thing. It's cool for the people to have tools. We got lots of tools, that's great. But it's so weird to bet your business on entirely outsourcing critical thought, creativity, collaboration, partnership to like, this thing that can generate grammatically correct paragraphs. Like, it's, it just feels like such a weak sauce version of leadership.

• 32:19Charlie Warzel?

  How hard has it been? To give that message to to to this group of people like I like has it have you been effective in conveying that is the siren song of all of this like you know too difficult to resist like what are you butting up against with this?

• 32:36Speaker 04

  Two things. Okay, so like it's a great question like on the one hand, we have you spend a third of your waking hours at work like if you're lucky and have like a normal work schedule, you spend a third of your waking hours at work. So I think for like a large number of people, the idea that one, we just fully and outright reject the idea that like that's how we're going to spend a third of our waking hours as a collective like absolutely not. Um, two, we've seen it and that lends some credibility and that like we've seen inside a lot of organizations and like we talked to a lot of leaders about moments at work that really mattered to them. I think the the conventional wisdom is like, nobody would have any moments at work that mattered to them. Nobody would have any moments where a boss like saw them, connected with them, like brought them

• 33:18Speaker 04

  up, helped skill them up, helped unlock the next stage of their career because like work is crappy. We have to spend a third of our life there and it's always going to be crappy. But like the fact of the matter is you ask people, do you have one of these moments? Do you have one of these things that happened where like work really mattered to you or like was a support or a stability for you at a time where like the rest of your life was really rocky? People by and large do. And so our starting point, I think for a lot of folks is that the idea that it could be good for a lot of folks is one, a radical concept and two, a very welcome idea.

• 33:49Speaker 02

  But like when you ask about receptiveness, it's funny. One of the first companies we ever worked with was an AI company. And I remember meeting with the leaders that were going to be coming through a program with us. And this one guy came in very sort of eccentric professor vibes when he came in sort of scattered, came in a couple minutes late. And he said, you know, I'm coming to this management program, they're sending everybody to this management program, but I need you to know something right up front. I don't believe any human should manage any other human.

• 34:16Speaker 04

  Okay, got it.

• 34:16Speaker 02

  Cool. Fair. Yeah, great. Um, he said, but I've never done a program like this before. So you know, I'm open to it. I just want you to know that upfront.

• 34:26Speaker 02

  By like the third week of the program, he's sitting there reading High Output Management by Andy Grove, which is sort of, you know, former CEO of Intel is like standard management text, particularly in tech circles. We're talking about hiring and he's looking at a job description and he's like, there's a bunch of gendered stuff in that job description. You're going to end up with a really tilted candidate pool. If you keep doing like, he's fully engaged with it. And like, he's really thoughtful and conscientious about how to engage with it. He just didn't know. The receptiveness is really easy sell. It's a surprisingly easy sell. Nobody likes to be in a job that they don't know how to do and feel like they're failing all the time. And if you can give them some stuff, you know, there's this moment where you give them some tools and they're like, well, I don't know if that's going to work.

• 35:09Speaker 02

  And then you get them back next week and they're like, that did work. What else do you have, right? And like, it's actually really easy to convince.

• 35:26Speaker 00

  If you're trying to get news today, you'll find a lot of biased algorithms, rage bait and AI noise. Thanks, social media. That's where Inpress comes in. It's a social platform on top of factual journalism, not the other way around. Track your reading and earn points. It's like Strava for your brain. Plus, you can connect with other users in your city who share your genuine curiosity. Ditch the echo chamber for reality with Inpress. Download it today for iOS or Android at inpress.app. That's I, N as in news nerd, press.

• 36:00Speaker 01

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• 36:32Charlie Warzel?

  How worried are you guys that this, that these tools, these AI tools will effectively just act as a Band-Aid for any of these, any of these moments of, instead of having to think about it hard and have that, that conversation that's ultimately really fruitful and ultimately like helps me and everyone else around, I'll press this button instead?

• 36:52Speaker 04

  We come back around again, right? Is like if I am your direct report and I fucked up in a meeting, like I'm sorry, I just like, I didn't know that thing and I said that thing and I thought it was a good idea at the time, but like whatever. I screw up in a meeting and what happens after that meeting is you send me a thing to tell me I screwed up in that meeting and it is perfectly outlined, it is perfectly structured and you've, you know, you've like given the feedback to an LLM, but it spit out a thing and then I get the thing. We're back to the part where I'm like, that's rude as shit. Tell me, if I screw up, like tell me. I am a grown up. I can absolutely handle it. But like you're back to this weird moment in work culture right now. Well, either that's a well-intentioned

• 37:33Speaker 04

  manager trying to, to format a thing so that it lands correctly without having to have the like social risk in that moment of like, if I send it to Melissa and she's upset about it. Well, if GPT wrote it, like she's mad at GPT. She's not mad at me. But like if I actually put time and effort and energy into it, I might get it wrong. It might not land well and I might have to spend some time reflecting on like, that isn't the way I wanted that to go. I want it to go differently next time.

• 37:59Speaker 02

  There's this study, even if it never touches the employee, even if it's just something that the manager does, you know, they go into their own chat window and say, here's what happened. How am I supposed to think about it? Study came out a little while ago talking about sycophancy in LLM chats and its effect on sort of attribution of fault during conflict. So I get into a fight with someone or my direct report is pissed off because they didn't get a promotion or I've got hard feedback to give to them and I gave them the feedback, but it didn't go the way I wanted it to. And so I'm using chat to help me debug it. And what the study found is that the more sycophantic the LLM is, The more likely I am to feel like I did nothing wrong, the more likely I am to bring

• 38:43Speaker 02

  that sense that I did nothing wrong into my future interactions with that person. And then you cross multiply with the like studies that are like well established now that like LLM use suppresses critical thought and critical reflection and that a major component for leadership development is critical thought and critical reflection. And you're like, you're in a, you're in a bad spot, even if the employee never receives that GPT message, just me using GPT as my leadership coach is likely to really impair my sense of my relationship with my people and also my own reflection.

• 39:16Speaker 04

  Outside of management and leadership circles, it may not be obvious why that's like such a core component, but basically like if you are in a modern organization today, like one of the biggest problems that we have of getting bosses to show up differently in the role is that they're often running from like meeting to meeting to meeting to meeting to meeting. So if something goes wrong in my first meeting of the day, I have no opportunity other than 2am when I'm staring at the ceiling to think about like, how did that go and what do I want to have happen next time? Humans are really fricking good at this went this way, like I touched the hot stove. I don't want to touch the hot stove again. And here's what I'm going to do differently. If they've got time to think about it. The hard part that we have in our, in our industry and in our sort of line of work is that like for many leaders, like there's, there's not any of that baked in anymore.

• 40:00Charlie Warzel?

  I want to get here near the end of something bigger though, that we're kind of circling around all of this, which is this idea of a constant replacement in work, right? Replacing the expectations of how much work should take up someone's life, how, you know, the expectations of how much dignity someone should be able to derive from it, the expectations of the path of predictable progress in a given career. The technologies often that we put into these spaces, you know, as we said, they free up space that is then used to, you know, fill more in. You keep piling stuff on here without the attention and as much of the focus in the, the nourishing qualities that we're, we're

• 40:42Charlie Warzel?

  talking about here and the things that might give people some purchase and some connection. You've all been writing a little bit around this idea lately of social atrophy and the, the role that work plays. What is work's role right now in this broader? Loneliness epidemic, third space dwindling, broader disconnection feeling that a lot of people are experiencing.

• 41:06Speaker 04

  We started to see weird glimmers about two years ago where a lot of organizations were saying like, I'm managing a team, but my team is geodistributed, right? And so like, I'm managing people all over the world. And sometimes I'm managing them like occasionally in office, but sometimes I'm managing them. And like, we don't share a lot of overlapping daylight hours and we work in sort of like our own Zoom windows. And for my folks where I'm managing them and they're not interacting with a lot of people, things have gone a little bit weird. And what do I do about that? Like as a management question, right?

• 41:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, we come into our programs.

• 41:40Speaker 04

  We come into our program and say like, I'm not at like, like it's not a performance problem per se. They're showing up for meetings, they're like, the camera's off, but they're like, they're showing up, but things have just gotten wobbly enough that I have like a, an overarching wellness concern. What do I do with that?

• 41:55Speaker 02

  The more we looked at it, the more we saw, you know, Melissa uses this language of, you know, work as the last bastion. The Robert Putnam, road bowling alone, right? And talked about, you know, people aren't in bowling leagues anymore, but they also aren't in rotary clubs and they also aren't in churches. And like, you know, they, that whole sense of like, our community glue is eroding, if you want to take the, the worst version of it, or certainly evolving. But that through all of it, work is a place that you show up and you're around other people and, you know, they see you and appreciate you when you do good things and give you interesting things to, to work on, or at least give you interesting things to talk about while you're getting coffee. When that falls apart, there isn't another backstop, there isn't another place we spend eight hours a day, five days a week.

• 42:41Charlie Warzel?

  So you feel like these, these tools, as they're further embedded in the workforce, especially if they're embedded, you know, not critically, are a real threat to that?

• 42:53Speaker 04

  I think if we had community answers for human connection, I would be less worried. But we have eroded most of our social answers that are like baked in, right? We don't live near our relatives anymore. And most of us go away. And then like we sort of set up new communities and maybe we've got some chosen family. But like, we have a really different context. And our backstop for a lot of us, like our sort of last bastion was work, where we had to go and we had to socialize. And even when we didn't feel like it, we had to like put on our hard pants and like get ourselves sorted and like, you know, um, do the thing. And humans are social creatures.

• 43:37Speaker 04

  Like it is core to who we are the whole way along.

• 43:41Charlie Warzel?

  I fully agree with that. And yet I want to, I want to push back slightly because I can imagine there's people listening here who are going to say, work, work is work. Work is not family. Work is, work should be transactional. And these AI tools depersonalizing work in some way, in making it so that like, yeah, when Tony sends that email and it's very clear that he doesn't care because it's a chatbot. Ultimately, that may be even a better thing, right? Or, or these tools are going to free people up to, you know, not have that time. I, I think we've sort of debunked that part of it. But this idea that, you know, an impersonalization is actually a feature, not a bug.

• 44:24Charlie Warzel?

  That these companies, you know, we were talking earlier about Amazon warehouses and things like that. You know, one, one of the rebuttals to that from the, you know, AI evangelist guy on, you know, X.com is going to be like, who cares, man? It's a business. Like, we're supposed to wring out every inch of productivity or whatever. And yeah, there'll be more, you know, bots in the chain so that we don't have to, you know, hang up ibuprofen because people have repetitive stress injuries. This sort of, you know, the true mercenary level, but also the mercenary level, I think, on the sense of employees who are like, I've had it. I've been exploited by the system for so long. I, I actually like the idea that this, you know, this is going to feel depersonalized.

• 45:09Charlie Warzel?

  How do you see that, you know, butting up against the last bastion status?

• 45:16Speaker 04

  We meet a lot of those folks. We meet a lot of folks who are like, I just don't want to care anymore. I have cared a lot and like, I really feel like I'm ready to care less. It's hard and the reality for those folks is like, it's tricky. You can put yourself into a role in an organization that you think you'll be fine and like, you will still manage to like, get yourself promoted and they will still figure out that you've got ideas and you will still find your way to like, they often find their way back to, okay, I do care about this. I don't necessarily need it to be like my entire waking hours or like my entire personality. I need some space from it and some other elements in play. But it's hard. It's very hard. A lot of folks have work as a key component and a core element of their identity.

• 45:58Speaker 04

  You can say like, oh, well, they shouldn't, like they're silly. They're foolish for like, feeling like that's a moment of profound identity shift. But again, like, we have to work with like, humans as they are and not as we wish them to be. I think it's okay that people care about their work.

• 46:12Speaker 02

  Yeah. When you hear that, like, have boundaries. Get out of toxic workplaces, right? Because you, you, nobody's saying, wherever you are, that's where you must be forever. Otherwise you're ungrateful. Otherwise you're not applying yourself. Like that's, that's foolish. Like if you, if you need to get out, get out. If you need to keep yourself safe, keep yourself safe. But like, in a deeper sense,

• 46:33Speaker 02

  I don't believe you. We do actually care about this shit. And so like, if you don't care about your job, that's fair. Do whatever you need to do. Capitalism's mean, right? But like, you will not sell me on nobody cares about their jobs or that it's not worth caring about your job because so many of the people we find who draw so much meaning from it, don't see themselves in that at all.

• 46:57Charlie Warzel?

  So to end then, with that in mind, how does that intersect with this idea that like, oh, you know, these AI tools are, are going to destroy knowledge work or white collar work or whatever? Is that a bulwark against it? Like the idea that there's a lot of people out there that fundamentally give a shit? Because it feels to me, if that part is really true, you're going to have this technology come right up against people's like a major pillar of who they are. And I don't think that there is a sense that yes, capitalism can sort of just like, you know, knock, knock people over, bend people to their whims. But I also think that like, it seems to me like this is all geared to meet some like really heavy

• 47:42Charlie Warzel?

  resistance from people who work. Do you think that's true?

• 47:47Speaker 04

  Remember that like protest looks a lot of different ways, but like me feeling like as an employee, I've got options in terms of where I work and who my colleagues are and whether I have colleagues at all, means that like organizations that sort of lend themselves to that or specifically go out with a message that says like, this is, this is what we're doing. We're going to have colleagues. It's going to be great. You're going to love it. You're going to be in an occasional meeting that isn't useful. It'll be okay.

• 48:16Speaker 02

  But there'll be small talk beforehand and nobody likes small talk, but it is interesting to see, you know, how her vacation went and stuff.

• 48:23Speaker 04

  But like you will see change, I think, less through walkouts and more through people feeling like the pendulum swings back and organizations are trying to hire again. And AI companies in particular are very skilled at what it looks like to have a very hot talent market and to have to compete on the merits of the organization.

• 48:39Speaker 02

  Isn't that wild? That like while they're telling everybody else to lay off your team and pay the remaining ones as little as possible for doing 10 people's worth of work.

• 48:47Speaker 04

  They are having 2021's version of the labor market.

• 48:50Speaker 02

  Like just throw any amount of money at getting top talent. We need the right people in the door. Otherwise, we're not going to be able to build the future. Like what? I thought Claude was doing that.

• 49:01Charlie Warzel?

  Alyssa, Jonathan, thank you so much for coming on Galaxy Brain and talking about the weird future of what we all do.

• 49:09Speaker 04

  It was a lot of fun. Thank you.

• 49:10Speaker 02

  Thank you.

• 49:11Charlie Warzel?

  This episode of Galaxy Brain was produced by Renee Klar and engineered by Miguel Carrascal. Our theme is by Rob Smersiak. Claudine Abaid is the executive producer of Atlantic Audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor. That's it for us here. Thank you again to my guests, Jonathan and Melissa Nightingale. If you liked what you saw, new episodes of Galaxy Brain drop every Friday. You can subscribe on the Atlantic's YouTube channel, or on Apple, or Spotify, or wherever it is that you get your podcasts. And if you want to support this work and the work of my colleagues, you can subscribe to the publication at theatlantic.com/listener. That's theatlantic.com/listener. Thanks so much, and I'll see you on the internet.

• 49:57Speaker 00

  If you're trying to get news today, you'll find a lot of biased algorithms, rage bait, and AI noise. Think social media. That's where InPress comes in. It's a social platform on top of factual journalism, not the other way around. Track your reading and earn points. It's like Strava for your brain. Plus, you can connect with other users in your city who share your genuine curiosity. Ditch the echo chamber for reality with InPress. Download it today for iOS or Android at inpress.app. That's I, N as in news nerd, press.