If you had 20% of your time back at work each day, how would you spend it? This is the question that Lareina Yee , senior partner at McKinsey and chair of the McKinsey Technology Council, poses to me as we discuss the implications of generative A.I. for workers over Zoom .
Ever since OpenAI launched ChatGPT in 2022 , the world has been in a tizzy about the idea of robots, quite literally, taking over our jobs. A 2023 survey conducted by Fortune and The Harris Poll found that 40% of workers familiar with ChatGPT worry it will replace them. Thousands of them have already lost their jobs to the technology.
Top VC Kai-Fu Lee even predicts that A.I. will displace 50% of our jobs by 2027.
If true, this could seriously impact our career trajectory and bank accounts. But it could also threaten our sense of purpose, which many of us derive from and even search for in our work , especially in light of the Great Resignation. McKinsey research finds that 70% of employees say their sense of purpose is defined by their work.
If A.I. takes that work away, where would that leave us? It all depends on how we use our time, which is the point Yee is making when she throws out her question.
She believes that generative A.I. will actually allow us to find greater purpose and joy at work by replacing our job’s mundane tasks, freeing us up to foster human connections and invest in personal growth.
“We don’t have data that shows how people spend it, but the optimist in me says you would spend .