Likely Normal

The modern workplace is less humans collaborating and more humans frantically appeasing their robot overlords. AI has slithered into every corner of office life, from the chatty Slack bot that suggests synergistic paradigm shifts (read: nonsense) to the HR algorithm that auto-rejects your PTO request because it detected “excessive happiness” in your submission.

Email? AI drafts it (badly). Scheduling? AI manages it (poorly). Performance reviews? AI writes them (with all the warmth of a spreadsheet). The only thing these systems do flawlessly is fail in ways that would get a human fired. Case in point: the smart calendar that books you for back-to-back meetings in different time zones, or the recruitment bot that disqualifies a Nobel Prize winner because their resume lacked “buzzword density.”

Meanwhile, employees have become glorified AI babysitters—correcting its mistakes, explaining to clients why the personalized auto-response called them “Dear Valued Customer #4782,” and pretending not to notice when the “productivity tracker” logs your coffee break as “idle time.” The real kicker? AI gets promoted faster than you do. While you’re stuck in learning modules, the office chatbot is already on its third “version upgrade”—despite still thinking “ASAP” is a type of printer error.