We Might Be Automating This Work Without a Full Understanding of It

At this point, AI has touched pretty much every workplace and every job, to some degree—from customer service to medicine to the little automated pop-up that appears whenever I cut-and-paste something into a document. This can sometimes be handy, but other times can degrade what John’s Hopkins University sociologist Allison J. Pugh calls “connective labor” in her latest book, The Last Human Job. This type of labor involves “seeing the other and reflecting understanding back,” an action critical to “millions of jobs, including people working not just in health care, counseling, or education, but also in the legal, advertising, and entertainment industries, in management, in real estate, in tourism, even in security.”