July 19th was a day for help-desk heroes and support superstars. A routine software update by CrowdStrike, a cyber-security company, caused computer outages in offices, hospitals and airports worldwide. Most white-collar workers looked disconsolately at their screens and realised just how useless they are if they cannot log in. People in it came to the rescue of helpless colleagues and stranded passengers. Their work that day was full of stress—but also full of meaning. If machines can add purpose to some jobs when they fail, what about when they work properly? This is not an idle question. Discussions about artificial intelligence (ai) in particular easily get lost in hypothetical debates about wholesale job losses or, worse, the nature of consciousness. But technologies tend to spread in less dramatic ways, task by task rather than role by role. Before machines replace individuals, they change the nature of the work they do. That is likely to affect job satisfaction. Many employees put a higher premium on non-monetary than monetary rewards. A recent Federal Reserve discussion paper by Katherine Lim and Mike Zabek surveyed American workers who had switched jobs to find out whether and why they thought their new positions were better; they found that interest in the work mattered more to people than pay and benefits. Which is why another recent paper, from Milena Nikolova and Femke Cnossen of the University of Groningen and Boris Nikolaev of Colorado State University, makes for sobering reading. The authors looked at the prevalence of robots in industrial settings and how that affected workers. Robots reduced the perceived meaningfulness of jobs across the board, irrespective of age, gender, skills and the type of work. In theory, machines can free up time for more interesting tasks; in practice, they seem to have had the opposite effect.

Full report : Machines might not take your job. But they could make it worse.