You may be familiar with the term “woke-washing,” which is appropriating the language of social justice into marketing materials. (See also: “Chasing Insta impressions.”) Now there is a new term to consider: “work-washing,” which is where companies claim that the great promise of automation is not you potentially losing a job, but rather you being freed from humdrum, boring, task work.
In some organizations — the functional ones, usually — this is true. Automation is top of funnel stuff, and repeatable task work. It supplements humans. It does not replace them per se. Perhaps some of them, but the low end of the salary spectrum and the low end of the experience spectrum. This is bad in terms of career pathways, but probably won’t affect a lot of people who might read this. It may affect your children, but telling people “This might affect your children” usually gets you cancelled, slapped, and stabbed, so let’s not go there.
In a chunk of organizations — those run by cost-cutters — automation is absolutely coming for jobs, because the goal of most companies is to please stakeholders and contain costs. People? We don’t even refer to them as human beings. They’re human resources. In those companies, “work-washing” is very real, and consultant-driven. The marketing message is “You’ll never be bored again!” but the real message is “You might be bored, but it’s not gonna be our problem, because you ain’t gonna be working here anyway!”
Be careful how you think about these things. The general narrative you see in articles and in conversations is “Well, we’ve had seismic technological shifts before, like the steam engine! And we became OK! We’re not farmers, right? I’ll be fine and so will my kids.” It’s not exactly that simple this time. New jobs will be created, no doubt, but we’re at a very specific tipping point around greed, the lack of value from the education system, the supposed “skills gap,” business models based more on intangible value, etc, etc. A few years ago, The New Yorker called the rise of automation and AI like “squeezing the entire Industrial Revolution into the life span of a beagle.” That isn’t wrong. Some shit is coming down the pike, and fast. As you navigate your own career, be weary of “work-washing.”
