In the future, will everything be required to be in-person?!? There was a time in Ancient Greece, when writing was emerging as a popular technology, where the society doubled down on the importance of in-person communication. All legal proceedings required in-person testimonies. The belief was that anything written was useless, because there was no way to verify who wrote anything. The people of that society had experience deciding who to believe based on what they saw and heard for themselves, so when they encountered this strange new technology of writing that disrupted all they knew, their initial reaction was to return to what they knew. Over time humans figured out how to systematize and regulate the legitimacy of written documents. Most societies swung hard the other way and generally dismissed in-person oral testimony in favor of written documents. For the last couple hundred years citizenship, ownership, finances, have all been determined by the written documents. Today there are signs that our society might be responding to the rise of generative AI by doubling down on in-person experiences in a way similar to how the Ancient Greeks initially responded to writing. Return to office mandates seem to be an example of this. This could be one reason organizations would willingly sacrifice the benefits of being able to attract talent from all over the world. The leaders feel like they can’t vet the legitimacy of what their employees are doing. They feel unable to differentiate the real from the fake. They want to see and hear employees with their own eyes. And for job applicants and hiring teams who are both confounded by AI (for job seekers it’s the AI screening tools that reject their applications and for hiring managers it’s the thousands of AI generated applications that waste their time) networking and in-person events may once again be the best tactic for getting a new job or hiring a great candidate. Both sides can see and hear what is real for themselves.

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