Beyond the Paycheck
3 years, 2 months, 4 days, 19 hours
27 May 2026
Work is critical for an individual’s sense of worth, their mental health and their enjoyment of life.
‘Enabling the UK to be an AI front-runner is not optional. It is foundational for our economic future’. So said a senior UK government official in a round-table I attended two weeks ago, where the focus of the conversation was the data-centre capacity necessary to support that AI future, and the planning process, grid investment, energy demand and net-zero implications of that.
What struck me most about the conversation, was the apparently universal agreement with the assertion that AI was going to be so important that we needed to facilitate the roll-out of it at almost any cost. And that indeed mirrors what I termed the AI frenzy in my 1 February blog At What Cost; a frenzy which is continuing to drive huge growth in global equity markets.
Yet when I talk to friends one-to-one, fear is more evident than excitement. A cousin has just lost his back-office job in an investment bank, because they are cutting budgets on the assumption that AI can do a lot of the work of his department. A former colleague whose views I sought, questioned who would be the beneficiaries of this supposedly bright AI future.
These are not Luddite or ignorant fears. Indeed in 'The Economist' this week the second leader is titled ‘How to prepare for a jobs apocalypse’. Unfortunately, all the suggestions in that article treat work as if it is just a source of money, so the solutions involve various forms of taxation, for example of AI firms, and redistribution.
But as my former colleague pointed out, work is critical for an individual’s sense of worth, their mental health and their enjoyment of life. Perhaps AI would like to suggest how we deal with that?