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The modern white-collar workplace has been understood by some as an exemplar of the "longhouse": an increasingly feminized environment where "alignment" and "consensus" matter more than "action" and "execution".
In the age of AI, I posit three phases in the evolution of the modern workplace, the labor market, and (as a result) society more broadly.
Phase 1: increased ossification and feminization. This will occur because the (mostly male) "doers" on which the company relies are likely the first to be automated. There may still need to be a handful of rockstar performers, but the age of AI will, at least initially, make all intellectual endeavors a winner-takes-all market. With the actual work mostly automated, the remaining management is free to spend even more time doing longhouse things.
Phase 2: the return of the laborer. There will be a simultaneous increase in blue-collar jobs (with a glut in software, demand will increase for physical/real-world goods) and an increase in blue-collar labor, occupied primarily by men. White-collar labor becomes increasingly rare. The layers of middle management are no longer required, and if capabilities continue on trend it won't be long before the only thing preventing some white-collar industries from full automation will be slow capability diffusion. In this step, society will become more masculine. It will appear that a "retvrn" to traditional gender roles is underway. Men will again perform the large share of labor.
Phase 3: automation. Robotics and automated factories to create the robots become a reality. Labor demand sharply declines. Depending on how society handles this transition it could be a time of broad prosperity and leisure, or it could be a time of strife and mass inequality. But either way, the longhouse will come back with a vengeance. In a society where labor and intellect are no longer required, the only thing that will matter is status games and relative positioning. This is a game that the feminine temperament is better suited for. The boot that stomps forever on our faces will be high-healed.
As a male in an intellectual role, none of these three phases will be kind to me.
I'm not too confident but I think it might be the opposite in phase 1 and generally.
(Human) speed might be what matters most. Speed of recognizing opportunities, speed in drafting and creating and redrafting and giving directives, testing, iterating, marketing, learning new things. Agents work fast, they can do months of work in weeks. I'm trying to use agent swarms right now and get my money's worth and it is quite stressful managing multiple projects at the same time, reviewing what's been done and issuing good instructions. There's no time for further collaboration between people on top of that.
By the time all the meetings and collaboration is finished, the opportunity is already gone! When work automates, the scope for competition increases dramatically (outside the govt sector at least). As tempo increases, the longhouse declines, decisions shall need to be made quickly and finally by a single actor.
Also, men have an innate advantage with AI in that they're more interested in machines and technology, whereas women are more into people. Nearly all techbros and early adopters and entrepreneurs are men. Men tend to be more pro-AI and pro-datacentre.
Switching from process-driven procedural and human-facing work to freeform instruction-giving, directorial work with machines favours men I think.
Some people seem to really hate datacentres. Can someone steelman this for me?
There's niche, addressable issues like local power/water prices (and I'm not sure I understand the water argument as it should be reusable just like in your desktop rig) and the infrasonic hum that can apparently cause anxiety over the long term. Outside of that though, it just seems like the phobia over anything nuclear.
Is this just a subconscious projection of a fear of change and obsolescence? I can't imagine seeing the first railroads go down during industrialisation and decrying the whole thing (unless maybe you're a part of the teamsters union).
Some datacenters in desert areas used evaporative coolers. That does use a substantial amount of water, in an arid area no less.
Then the media and academia did its thing, and now the public believes that it's an issue for all datacenters in all climates.
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