Generative AI Is replacing remote work in the future of work debate

Work’s main issue is no longer the future of inanimate bricks and mortar of offices – significant economically though this is to city centers, commutes and the real-estate industry. — Photo by JJ Ying on Unsplash

As autumn leaves start to fall, I’m shedding some of the working assumptions I made a year ago when I began writing this column. While we have all been having endless arguments about flexible working and what has been rudely mocked as "shirking from home,” that chapter has been written. Hybrid working has persisted despite efforts by large companies to lure workers back to the office. The dominant story about the present and future of work is about a different kind of hybrid: How ordinary workers co-exist with digital co-workers.

Work’s main issue is no longer the future of inanimate bricks and mortar of offices – significant economically though this is to city centers, commutes and the real-estate industry. Nor is it about the alternative "space” of the much-vaunted metaverse, which Wired Magazine describes as so vague that if you replace it with cyberspace "ninety percent of the time, the meaning won’t substantially change.”