Towards the end of Bureaucracy and how good that could be

Have you ever worked on a company which seems to be like a good (and old) machine. Following interminable bureaucratic tasks, in order to ensure the quality of a work, and all the process align with what the company is selling. This giant companies like Procter and Gamble, Accenture or IBM, relied a lot in their internal business processes, and this makes a lot of sense, when you are working at a worldwide scale you need to be able to deliver consistently, and bureaucracy, even when its boring a make a lot of work tedious is the only way to create some kind of control. And when you operate on scale this matters.

Bureaucracy is the way that humans have found to organize themselves around a task, but is also a big part of why young people is reacious to work on corporation. And this is a big problem for companies. People get tired of working and just start delivering poorly, at a point that even good and educated people might became only NPCs, bureaucracy administrators.

Young people is used to a new generation of working without working. Videogames, Education platforms, and applications, have teach people to create dopamine in ways that previous generations didnt have. Instagram scrolling, gamification, wearables, this seem something stupid, but it help our generation get through its day. Its impossible for nearly 80% if not more of adults to stay away of its cellphone for a whole week. And while its real that all this bast ocean of information and connection trap us, is also true that it also help us, and allow us to advance in tasks, or get distracted in new ways.

Im not saying Social Networks dopamine mechanism are right, but yes that they are useful and insightful in how to get people want to do something. Hopefully that would more useful than an endless scrolling. This new way of being stimulated, makes people requiere some kind of stimuli in order to complete a task and being rewarded, and thats something that is really difficul to have in a traditional company. Why there is no serious gamification at companies, why we dont fell like we are just playing a video game at our best capability.

This seems somewhat impossible, work is not inherently fun, sometimes you have to suffer to win, but that doesnt mean you can enjoy it like a video game. The future of work need to change too in order to have a more accomplished society, you want to be a digital nomad, a freelancer, you should be able to do it, and in order to do that it needs to give you an incentive strong enough to makes you want to get better. And this is what some companies are exploring at the intersection of working and human data collection.

Work Engines and Data Sets

Every bureaucratic process has a well defined template to achieve a certain degree of quality, style or standarization. Some marketing workflows in big companies required people to follow a certain set of rules to create and follow a plan. This tend to be a set of steps that could be easily automated, this is what we call the workflow. AI is helping automatizing workloads, such as marketing operations, sales coldreach and other tasks. And while this is part of how automation in the workspace is going to look like, a lot of bureaucratic and operational task being coordinated and executed by AI. There is still room for human involvement. Human In The Loop RL is what makes the difference between a regular model and an excellent one. AI Agents are great to coordinate tasks, but they might suck to have common sense. Common sense, might be the most underrated tool for survival that we have, our imagination and understanding of reality (without needing to kill a hole planet to do so) is our biggest advantage. And its what some companies are starting to exploit. The Data recollectors of AI (which tend to be integrated or associated with data annotation companies), are creating new ways of work, connecting humans with tasks that need to be completed by AI teams. This companies present completely new ways of help human work. And its not only completing tasks of your domain of expertise (which could vary in complexity). Its also working in a freelancer style, taking care of activities that look like logic or business interpretation games, where you get rewarder for present your unique insight, your uniqueness. It doesnt matter how weird is your guy of thinking, as long as you present a new set of instructions that vary or defi the crowd, you are adding information that helps creating a greater understanding for the hole. AI need Human Data, and is not to replace us, but to enhance our organizations and coordinate us to create new breakthroughs that we wont suspect.

AI work organizations and the not apocaliptic view

A human is made of millons of bacterias, cells and other forms of life that we dont even understand, all those components help in building a bigger consciousness. What if instead of trying to control us, the AI relies on us to understand a reality, that for its inherent evolution scape of it domain. May be the new frontier of work is understanding how we can collaborate to improve this omnipresent systems that will be coordinating our society. Finding its edges, its interpretation flaws, its imagination. A human being can create so many out of the box ideas with so little data, that we are a true biological miracle. Organizing new work categories that create a fun experience for compete against the AI understanding will help us understand better our possibilities and the limitations of AI. And its the future that I want to believe we will have. After all im an optimist, and I want to believe that people is not as bad as the villains in the movies, they are just humans, and if (specially the ones that we are culturally aligned) have the chance, they will try to do the best they can for their society. Even with its flaws.