Over-optimised by AI

Earlier this week I received an email from a recruiter who emailed me about my career. It was a decent email, and seemed human-written. However, the email was signed off by a "custom networking agent", who told me to Google it if I wasn't familiar. It also asked me not to trash the message but to reply "unsub" if I hated it. What is wild about this interaction is that an AI decided I might want a new job, written to me about it, and rather assumed I'd reply through an AI of my own.

It isn't just recruiters. My own workflow has radically changed. I open my laptop and my inbox has already been read for me: emails sorted, the important ones at the top, drafts waiting for follow-ups I hadn't thought of. I move to Slack, where a recap has summarised every thread I supposedly need to read, and a colleague's agent has run the product-update tooling so I don't need to read the changelog any more. While doing this, my meeting bot pops up with a tidy brief before I've even joined my next call.

Everything we write or read now passes through an AI funnel, and every tool ships with AI bolted on whether it needs it or not. We've decided, as an industry, that no edge is too small to optimise away. But some of those edges were the work itself.

My own work has become strangely passive: a series of buttons that approve things other systems already decided. I read fewer things all the way through, and write fewer from scratch. When I do reach out to a person, I can often tell my question has been fed straight into an AI, because what comes back is an AI answer. I want to talk to people. I want a colleague to tell me what changed and why it mattered to them, not a summary of a summary.

So I think we need to find a balance. Used well, I do believe AI moves us forward; I'm not a pessimist about it. But we should aim it at the parts that genuinely drain us and protect the parts that make work worth doing: the reading, the thinking, the talking to each other. Otherwise we'll quietly optimise our way into jobs that run perfectly well without us in them. The tech industry built all of this, so if work has stopped feeling human, we are the ones who need to look in the mirror.