A baby boom, cleaner air, and AI. The work-from-home revolution might be over, but its impact is still being felt.
Many of us have settled into some type of hybrid setup, balancing our days in the office with at least one spent at home.
But even if you’re in the cubicles every day — God bless — the WFH revolution has still affected you.
Nick Bloom, a Stanford economist who’s a leading expert on remote work, spoke to BI’s Aki Ito about six ways the WFH era fundamentally changed things for us all.
Some are a bit … personal. Remote work led to a 5% increase in fertility in the US and Northern Europe, according to Bloom’s estimates. He summed it up with a line from a friend: “My wife and I discovered she can’t get pregnant by email.”
Other effects were more widespread, such as a reduction in nitrogen dioxide in major cities thanks to the new hybrid world.
But the biggest residual from the WFH era is what’s dominating our current workplace convos: artificial intelligence.
Bloom makes a strong case for why WFH crawled so AI could walk.
Digital communications surged when we abandoned our offices, creating a treasure trove of data for models to learn on. The casual water-cooler conversation became a documented Slack thread that could be fed into an LLM.
Now that most of us are in the office at least part of the time, that raises questions about how companies will source more training data.
Having picked the internet to pieces, AI companies are getting desperate for training data. They’ve gone so far as to create virtual workplaces.
Granted, people still Slack each other in the office. (I’ve fired off messages to colleagues sitting a few feet away. Sometimes you’ve got to see if you can actually make them “lol” IRL.)
There’s still a level of communication that goes undocumented, though. The quick coffee chat to brainstorm an idea. The impromptu deskside conversation.
That’s why executives were pushing us back to the office in the first place. For the organic collaboration and innovation that can only occur when rubbing elbows with colleagues. That RTO push could now pose real problems for AI’s development.
Companies could bug their own offices, making sure they pick up every little conversation, however benign, between workers. But that comes with plenty of legal and regulatory issues.
And at a time when workers are already on edge about losing their jobs to AI, actively recording their every word to improve models won’t do much to ease concerns.
Still, with billions of dollars invested and the fate of the stock market depending on the tech realizing some big ROI, AI companies will have to figure something out.
At least we’ve got some WFH babies joining the workforce in a few decades as reinforcements.
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