These days, I often come across articles discussing the impact of AI on jobs. I hear many conversations about AI replacing humans at work. I am privy to oft-repeated jokes and judgments about the reduced need for teachers and the threat to offline teaching from online models. Honestly, I feel a little nervous, like a mortal human, when conversations claim that AI poses a risk to my profession by performing, if not a better, at least an at-par job. But then, amid a clutter of several other more immediate, more urgent reasons to be anxious, I also feel amused by such claims. One of my super-favourite imaginations is of humans working with AI colleagues. It leads to many interesting questions and contradictions, which I share in this feature.

While imagination has no boundaries, let us, for fun and deliberation, imagine an office that employs both humans and robots. When I say 'robot,' my imagination is slightly filmi or popular-ish, confined to the mental models readily available, shaped by the likes of Bollywood's humanoid robot Chitti or childhood memories of Small Wonder. Ironically, AI's imagination is also limited, like mine. Using a prompt to generate an image for this blog yielded a robot that resembled the one I had imagined. So, it seems, AI's creativity is as average as my little brain. But it's also biased because I used the term person, but it created a white man. At least I am aware, which AI is not, as you can see below!

In the AI-generated cover of this blog, the white man appears to enjoy a conversation with Mr. Robo near the coffee machine. It is hard to tell whether Mr. Robo is enjoying it, too. Let us now step into an office where humans and the likes of Mr. Robo work together. Clearly, when AI generates images of human-robot collaboration, only the humans smile.

To begin with, what will be the conversations in such a workplace? Office communication is tricky; it demands sarcasm and resilience. A smiling colleague may secretly hate you, and a warm co-worker may say nasty things as soon as you leave. Will Mr. Robo be able to keep up with the hypocrisy of human behaviour, or will it be programmed to focus only on work? If the latter is true, colleagues will hate it. But if it's programmed to be human, why would a company replace an employee with a machine? This leads to serious catch-22 situations.

Jealousy, for instance, is the most common emotion at work, next only to fear. While it may motivate some good-natured optimists to do better, it leads most others to indulge in indigenous abuses in one's mother tongue. Will Mr. Robo be programmed to be jealous? If not, we may never get super performers. If yes, wouldn't jealous humans suffice?

The ritualistic, unofficial WhatsApp group is a core information mine. Will Mr. Robo, with its efficiency and dedication, qualify to be a member? Will it be able to digest the opposing thoughts and read between the lines? If yes, how? If not, how will it bond with others? Office jokes are contextual, and one needs immense expertise to identify the context and select the suitable audience. Will the average creative AI, with low self-awareness, be able to comprehend the context?

Tea and sutta breaks lie at the heart of office work. Will Mr. Robo, with no emotional or physical needs, have the urge, desire, and longing for such breaks? Will its program ever understand the criticality of tea, over a deadline? Social media use and gossip are basic traits of office employees. There are other skills, too - like the ability to inflate bills and consume free alcohol at parties, as if the world is moving into a famine. Most significantly, will it ever lie about grandmother's death for a hiking leave? Will it have even a slight inclination towards these fundamental traits?

In online meetings, will Mr. Robo dare to switch off the camera and sleep? Will it have the heart to deceitfully say "No" to a "Can you hear me?" Will it ever have the intelligence to know when to shut up and when to gather courage to speak in meetings? Will it know when to remember the minutes and when to forget completely, so that no one remembers?

And finally, will it be immensely fearful, and still look happy? Will it ever be able to become so simple, yet so complicated?

During COVID, when I was working from home, I noticed the work didn't feel tiring. Probably, the labour is in engagements and conversations because they demand emotional involvement - they impact the senses and stimulate the brain. This is why one may feel drained by the end of the day, dealing not just with work, but with people in happy and difficult moments - moments that may bring some compliments and some sarcasm, including really nasty feedback; some hellos and some ignorance; some apathy and some empathy; some healthy and some unhealthy competition and all in all, a roller coaster of emotions.

Every office employs people, but it becomes a world of imperfect, peculiar characters. These characters may be tolerable, annoying, or lovable. As we move quickly into the era of human-AI collaboration, it would be unnerving to see if we create Mr. Robos who focus only on efficiency. Will their efficiency make us happier, or turn the office into a dull place? Will we learn from machines and become like them, or will we continue to sustain the chaos and create imperfect machines too? Perhaps creativity lies in those imperfections. What makes us inefficient also makes us human, and the power of the human mind ultimately lies in that chaos.

What would you prefer? If you relate, please write to ritika.dms@mnit.ac.in.