We optimized ourselves into machines, and now the machines are here to show us how it's done.
The Summary
- Svetlana Makarova, AI product leader at IKS Health, calls it the "humanity discount": human traits like variability and emotion are becoming workplace liabilities as AI sets new consistency standards.
- Customer expectations recalibrate to AI's flawless output, forcing human workers to meet machine-level productivity, patience, and availability.
- The trap was set decades ago when we scripted, templatized, and standardized jobs to make them scalable, inadvertently making them easy to automate.
The Signal
AI never has a bad day. It doesn't get tired, stressed, or distracted by a sick kid at home. And now that it's sitting next to you in the workflow, your bad days stand out like never before.
Makarova, who led AI products at Mayo Clinic before joining IKS Health, sees this playing out across industries. The bar for human performance is creeping toward machine-level consistency. Not because anyone explicitly decided humans should work like robots, but because once customers and managers experience AI's relentless reliability, human variance starts looking like underperformance.
"Human workers begin to face unrealistic standards for productivity, patience, and availability."
This isn't new technology creating new problems. It's old decisions coming home to roost. For decades, companies have optimized work for efficiency: breaking jobs into repeatable tasks, imposing scripts and templates, measuring everything that moves. The goal was scale. The side effect was making those jobs trivially automatable the moment AI got good enough.
Key structural shifts:
- Jobs designed for consistency become jobs designed for replacement
- Performance metrics built for humans now favor machines
- Customer expectations reset to zero-defect baselines only AI can sustain
Call centers are the clearest example. Agents follow scripts so rigid they might as well be reading from punch cards. Customer service templates leave almost no room for judgment. Every interaction gets logged, timed, scored against a rubric optimized for throughput. That worked fine when you were comparing human to human. Now you're comparing human to ChatGPT with a headset.
The humanity discount isn't about AI replacing jobs outright. It's about AI resetting the baseline for what "good enough" looks like. When your competitor's AI handles 10,000 support tickets a day without a coffee break, your team of 50 people starts looking expensive and inconsistent, even if they're doing great work by 2023 standards.
The Implication
If your job has been fully standardized, you're not competing with AI on human terms anymore. You're competing on machine terms, and you will lose. The path forward isn't working harder or faster. It's reclaiming the parts of work that can't be scripted: judgment calls, relationship building, navigating ambiguity, solving novel problems.
Watch for companies that double down on efficiency metrics versus those rebuilding roles around irreducibly human work. The former are optimizing for replacement. The latter are building durable jobs in the agent economy.