The skills you need to maintain the robot that screws on the toothpaste tube caps
In Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Charlie’s father loses his job at the toothpaste factory. He screws on the caps on the toothpaste tubes. In the 2005 movie version, his job is replaced by a robot.
AI is slowly taking over rote work and administrative tasks. What does this mean for the people that do those jobs? The obvious answer is that they will be the ones maintaining the robots. Just like Charlie’s father at the end of the film. However, I think the path to get there for individuals is not smooth.
Recently, I spoke to a friend who has many people doing these adminstrative tasks. They felt frustrated that their work isn’t getting as much love from engineering as some other areas of the business. They hired people to work on automation, but it wasn’t moving the needle to the degree they hoped for. My suggestion to them was to hire engineers instead of admin people. Charlie’s dad is getting replaced with a robot engineer. But what happens to Charlie’s dad in this situation?
I’ve found one potential answer close to home. At Remote, we have a large legal team that has a very large influence on our product. They have to provide input to product managers, designers and engineers so they can build a product that helps our customers stay compliant. However, the game of telephone is slow and filters through priorities of other people. It’s hard to get small, low-impact things prioritized, even if they are high importance to e.g. a single lawyer or customer.
The solution for this problem - as many others - was found in agency. Some of the team members in the legal team downloaded our source code, Cursor, and with some help from AI and colleagues in engineering they contributed directly to the code of Remote.com.
Ultimately, I think this is the template for the future of knowledge work. You remain an expert, or as I like to imagine: someone with a high degree of taste in a particular field, but with far great capabilities; agency to affect reality. In this case: write code and push it to production.