This story started a long time ago on a Monday which was handled. For as long as history itself the humans needed to work, they wanted to work. To grow things, and create things, and build things, to see what they were capable of, to stand at day’s end and say “I did that!” Which felt pretty good.
So they worked more, built more, and created more, and traveled to far-off places. And then someone suggested submitting expense reports for those who far off places. His name was Glenn and he was a jackass…
The people kept getting better at work. They built better tools to work more efficiently. They built amazing machines to work faster. They built computers to work smarter. But still, they couldn’t do enough work. Because during all that work to do more work they had created work. And not the good kind…
Not the “let’s sit around and come up with ideas” kind. Not the “I can’t wait to get to work so I can jump into a new project” kind. The crap kind. The drudge and data and admin and the damned expense reports. So the humans had towork more at work they didn’t like. That made them robotic. That didn’t inspire.
They had to postpone vacations. They had to miss family dinners. They were pissed!
And then something happened.
Someone had a really amazing idea. They came into work and said “stop working and start working”. The humans thought she might have had while at lunch so she showed them a way to put the fun back into work, to waste less time doing the things they hated, to make more efficient the big tasks, to stop making the humans act like robots and start teaching the robots to learn the humans. Not to replace people but to free them, even Glen.
Robots that help us remember again that work only really works when we’re happy at it.
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