The Past, Present, and Future of Office Work
2nd November 2025
Generative AI commodifies the manipulation of digital information. It may take half a century, but I believe it will eventually lead to the extinction of office and administrative support jobs like administrative assistants and financial clerks. The entire purpose of these jobs is to lower the cost of transmitting and storing information. In the long-run, AI will drive the cost of “routine” information processing down to nearly zero, eventually eliminating the need for most human labor in those jobs (although we will need a lot more energy efficiency to get there!)
There is a clear analogy here to the impact of mechanization on farm labor. For most of human history, the bottleneck to increasing food production was physical power. Steam and electricity eventually relaxed that constraint, and farm work mostly disappeared because we only need so much food.
Similarly, the key bottleneck in business decision-making for most of modern history was a lack of information. Advances in information collection, storage and retrieval eventually relaxed that constraint, and now we are awash in data. Routine office jobs were created in a time of information scarcity, and they may no longer be needed.