The Future of Work May Look More Like a Pub Than a Platform

There is something fascinating happening at the same moment that so many people are predicting the disappearance of human work.

Put simply it appears that the more intelligent our tools become, the more valuable other humans seem to become.

I was thinking about this after reading an article arguing that now may be an unexpectedly good time to buy pubs in the UK. Not because people suddenly want more beer, but because people increasingly need somewhere to gather, argue, think out loud (and in and in a nod to Cheers) somewhere to belong. The article suggested that as AI takes over more routine cognitive work, the places that survive will not simply be transactional spaces. They will be communal ones.

I know that sounds romantic, "the local pub as the last defence against the machine age."

But then I thought about this week.

I ran two workshops over the last few days. One was for HR professionals. The other was for teachers. Different sectors, pressures even different vocabularies

And yet the emotional undercurrent in both rooms was remarkably similar. Again and again, participants spoke about the same thing. They came because they wanted to meet people. They wanted to hear how others were thinking, share how they are thinking and gain perspective. They wanted stimulation and I was surprised to hear how often each wanted to feel less alone in the complexity of what they were facing.

Perhaps that is why physical spaces of gathering may become more valuable rather than less in an AI-saturated world.

I've previously written that when information becomes abundant, interpretation and meaning increase in value. And when more of life can happen through a screen, being physically present with others starts to feel less optional and more restorative. Similarly I'm old enough to remember getting an email being exciting and the "snail mail" very boring. Today it's the opposite!

I suspect this is also why communities around learning, coaching, creativity, and reflection continue to grow despite predictions that digital convenience would replace them. People do not attend workshops solely for content transfer anymore. Most could probably receive the core ideas in a PDF, a podcast, or a summary generated in seconds.

They attend because thinking is often social.

The irony may be that the rise of AI increases the value of human gathering.