The Evolution of Work Isn't Superhuman. It's Super Human.
Photo featuring our very own Hoa Nguyen on a recent excursion in the Himalayas. Photo taken by Toh Huiran.
On our partner call last week, someone asked: if you were a superhero protecting the evolution of work, what would your superpower be?The Wand of Empathy emerged. The Cogs of Time. A hero named Equilibria wielding the power of nervous system regulation. Someone who could spot AI-generated lies from a mile away. Another who could read leaders' minds and instill them with love for their people before they made a culture-cutting decision.
Playful, yes. But the conversation kept circling back to something more urgent: as AI reshapes work at breakneck speed, what capabilities do we actually need right now? And beneath that, a bigger question started forming. AI promises to make us superhuman (faster, smarter, infinitely scalable). But what if that's not actually what the evolution of work needs?
What if it's about becoming super human instead?
There's a real distinction here. We're at a fork in the road, and the path we choose will shape not just how we work, but whether work remains a fundamentally human endeavor.
The Superhuman Path: Convenient Over Intentional
A CEO recently sent an avatar to deliver earnings results. Technically efficient. Saved time. Got the job done.
But was it the most desirable human thing to do, for that moment?
This gap between convenient and desirable might be the defining tension of our era. There are moments when you need your CEO to show up in real time, to express regret, to let you see the emotion behind the numbers. Some things are supposed to be hard. Letting people go. Delivering bad news. Showing up when it matters. If you try to remove the hard from those moments, you remove the meaning too.
Just because you can doesn't mean you should.
Someone mentioned Jack Dorsey's recent provocation about restructuring organizations from hierarchy to intelligence. His vision: machines at the centre doing all the data processing and analytics, humans at the edges interfacing with customers and creativity. Spherical, not stacked.
It's compelling. It's also terrifying. Who makes the decisions in this structure? What happens to self-determination when intelligence, not humans, sits at the core? What about the unconscious bias baked into the systems we build?
We've seen this pattern before. Energy-efficient light bulbs were supposed to reduce energy consumption. Instead, we just installed more lights. The context matters. If your frame is productivity, efficiency doesn't translate into rest or choice. It translates into more output in the same amount of time.
AI isn't reducing work right now. It's intensifying it. Employees are energized, throwing themselves into learning these tools.The boundaries between work and not-work blur.
It's exciting. Until the burnout hits.
What happens when the novelty wears off and people realize they've taken on significantly more work, possibly for the same compensation? Right now, a lot of people have a very cool hammer and they're looking for nails everywhere. Looking for anything they can do with the hammer rather than asking what actually needs the hammer.
This is the superhuman path. Optimize for speed. Scale for output. Remove friction wherever it appears. It's not inherently wrong. But is it in our best interest?
The Super Human Path: What Actually Makes People Flourish
Here’s what doesn’t change when AI enters the room: people bring their whole history to work with them. Every formative leadership dynamic. Every pattern from how they were raised. Every previous workplace relationship that shaped how they give and receive trust.
That’s the actual terrain leaders are working in. And no model is trained on it.
Managing relational tension is the real work. Knowing when to turn the heat up or dial it back, staying steady without the answers, spotting the decisions that look efficient on paper but cost the culture something it can’t get back: that’s ours. The bots can learn technical competencies. They can’t read a room.
Years of conversations with companies that are thriving, financially and from a human wellbeing perspective, point to the same things: connection, meaning, and financial security rebalanced in that order. That tracks with Harvard’s human flourishing research. It also tracks with what Within has seen consistently across our work. This isn’t a new insight for us. It’s just becoming harder to ignore.
And here’s what matters most: the companies doing this well aren’t trading profitability for people. They’re proving those things aren’t in conflict. When you orient around life-oriented measures, the financial results follow.
The Inversion We Didn't See Coming
There's a platform called Rent a Human where AI agents can now contract real people to do tasks they can't. Need someone to pick something up from a shop? Mend something? Deliver a parcel? The bot will hire you and pay you.
It launched as a joke. Now 700,000 people have signed up.
This isn't people using machines to get more done. It's machines using people to get more done. It circles back to that earlier idea about machines at the centre and humans at the edges.
Maybe this is where the superhuman path leads. We become the appendages to the intelligence at the core. Efficient, yes. Convenient, absolutely. But desirable? That's worth asking before we optimize ourselves into irrelevance.
The Work Worth Protecting
The Trinity (Claude, ChatGPT, Perplexity) can process information faster than we can. But they can't decide what's worth processing. They can't determine what's desirable. They can't turn down the heat or turn it up at exactly the right moment in a tense conversation.
That's on us. And that's the work worth protecting.
The evolution of work is super human. Not superhuman. We're not here to become bots following the bot. We're here to remain intentionally, meaningfully human while the machines handle what they do best.
That takes courage. The courage to ask what's desirable, not just what's convenient. To sequence our learning in phases rather than scrambling to use AI everywhere at once. To maintain the hard conversations that create meaning. To remember that relationship work, trust-building, showing up when it matters—that's ours to do.
Are we building work that makes us superhuman? Or super human? Only one of those futures is worth the effort.
This thinking emerged from our recent AI Pod partner call. You can listen to our ongoing exploration of AI and the evolution of work in AI and the Evolution of Work: Machines can be the machines.
