So the Notebook is becoming more than the sum of its parts. (Now my brain is off exploring the quintessential. STOP! Get back to the task in hand.)

When I began, I was simply looking for a friction-free surface where I might assemble a few notes on Essayism, in public. The first reason was that, after sixty-two years of essaying, I had finally given myself permission to describe my disposition publically, as that of an essayist. The second was that there is a peculiar accountability in sharing one's thoughts with others. I “own” them. I become much more attentive to the care with which I express them. It sharpens my performance of good faith. The words chosen better represent the thought than the sloppy scribble in a Moleskine while sitting at the back of a bus.

In the early days, I found my posts attracting three or four readers. So I did not distress myself when I returned to a note to amend it or add an addendum. It did not seem significant. Now it has become a habit. And I was about to make a significant amendment to an early post when I noticed that my posts now receive anything between 150 and 200 readers.

Should the quantity of readers matter? Probably not. But the notion of repeatedly presenting an incomplete thought has nagged at me a little.

So, some changes.

1: There is now a FAQ. If you have arrived here recently, you can now take a look at a few short paragraphs that I hope address the inquiries of curious minds as to what I am doing here.

2: I've created a Google search box. The menu item for it sits both in the header, alongside the FAQ, and in the footer. At the moment, the search incorporates both this site, The Essayist's Notebook, and the wider Essayism.org. At some point in the near future I may have to separate them. But the point is that, for now, you can type in a keyword, a concept, or a fragment of a title and probably find something somewhere across the two sites.

3: Amendments and Updates. This is a significant structural change, and the search option facilitates it well. Rather than add to, or silently expand, an existing note, I will create a new note that links to the original. It will flow into the wider broadcast mechanism and readers such as yourself will be alerted: there has been an update to the thought.

That's it. A bit of housekeeping that shows some courtesy to you, the reader, whom I have to thank for providing the accountability I was seeking.

It's been a while, and it's also been a recurring theme in my life recently. It seems I am very good at starting things, but then I lose interest in them after a short while. Maybe my mind is just like that: starting new things, but never finishing them.

I do want to do better here and keep writing what's on my mind. However, maybe not make it a daily thing, or try to convince myself it should be. Putting pressure on myself for things that make no sense to pressure myself for is senseless, if you think about it.

This isn't only something I am dealing with in writing, but also in a lot of other aspects of life. I pick up hobbies it seems like every single week, but then I never see them through. I lose interest almost just as fast as I gain it. Learning to play guitar, a new language, some AI coding stuff, or an idea that pops in my head. Been there, done that, a million times.

I must not be the only one dealing with this, though; I guess in today’s day and age, it’s also very easy to get constantly distracted by something new and shiny. Then, after a couple of days, something new and shiny pops up again, and the cycle continues.

Living in the Cradle of Humankind

Vredefort Dome

Two billion years ago an asteroid streaked into my neighbourhood and created an impact crater stretching two hundred and fifty kilometres across, known as the Vredefort Dome. Today, much of that crater has been eroded and not much is left as evidence except the melted and distorted rocks that indicated the voracity of the event. We lived in blissful ignorance of its existence until around the time I was born when pictures from space provided clues. I live on the edge of that impact crater in an area known as the Witwatersrand. This region has been core to the history of our planet. A region that gained its name from the colour of the water flowing over its northern edges.

This was by far the biggest event in the entire history of the area but there were several other significant events that shaped South Africa, one being the Anglo-Boer war and the years proceeding them. The region was being expanded and the conversion of the main transport from ox-wagon to railway was in progress when gold was discovered in the Witwatersrand. The gold deposits on the edge of asteroid impact zone were available in seams that could be mined. This triggered an attempt by a British imperialist who wanted to expropriate these by force. His name was Cecil John Rhodes who had made a commercial killing from the diamond mining in Kimberly. The attempt was repealed but would be a significant contributing factor to the Anglo-Boer war that followed.

Rhodes became rich mining diamonds in Kimberly. Such was the desire for the stones in this location, that men dug into the earth and created the largest man-made hole. The hole started as a hill and only once every diamond was extracted, did they stop.

Rinderpest

Shortly after the Cecil John Rhodes caper to the Witwatersrand, known as The Jamison Raid, the whole continent was struck by an outbreak of the Rinderpest. Large herds of cattle died or were culled, and the railway became a key resource and influence.

Albert Gielink, Herman’s father had holdings of cattle and sugar cane. He lost his herds to the Rinderpest and it impacted him badly even though he had several farms, and the sugar cane crops were still viable. His son Herman would use those farms and supplement them with wattle plantations. Wattle was required as a resultant demand from the expanded mining activities within the Witwatersrand.

However, Albert could not come to terms with the loss of his cattle. He committed suicide in the bedroom of his farmhouse. He slit his own throat and the blood soaked the linen of the bed. His daughter then washed the blood from the linen, and he was buried outside the boundary of the cemetery at the Lilienthal church. The Christians deemed that those who committed suicide were not worthy of being interned in the same cemetery as other members of the congregation.

Herman unexpected death in the car crash occurred after the outbreak of war in the world. The region was relatively unaffected by the war which devastated large parts of Europe but for the so-called Spanish flu that arrived with the returning soldiers from the war caused a crisis. The flu spread rapidly around the country via the rail system which the returning soldiers used to go back home after disembarking at Cape Town. Herman and his family survived the flu which devastated many communities but then succumbed to the horrific train accident. The fact that the two sisters survived, abate with bad injuries was incredible as the car was dragged several hundred yards by the train.

More than a hundred years later we are experiencing another pandemic, COVID. It is having the same devastating consequences on people's lives.

The Witwatersrand region is the most important contributor to humankind. This is the area where humanoids of various species first evolved to create humans. Over three hundred thousand years ago we had humanoids in the grasslands of the area that developed due to an optimal climate, neither too cold nor too hot. There was antelope in abundance with lightning creating spontaneous fires that could be exploited. The antelope herds were millions of creatures large and a herd would take days to pass by a specific location. Hunting was easier than a McDonald’s drive through!

Fake news

This history would be discovered when the settlers in the Witwatersrand started growing crops to feed the miners who streamed in when gold was discovered. The farms required lime which they mined from accessible caves in the area. Strange bones were discovered but it was only when an Australian anthropologist looked at them that their significance was realized. This discovery happened soon after the traumatic train accident that my grandmother was involved in.

However, the discovery by the Australian anthropologist mentioned above, Raymond Dart was suppressed by one of the biggest instances of scientific fraud ever published. In Britain, a group of individuals conspired to create the fake Piltdown man. Their inherent bigotry could not process the idea that Europe or even Asia was not the epicentre of the birth of humankind but rather Africa. It would be many decades and only after the Second World War that the Piltdown man hoax was exposed.

In many parts of the world hoax theory is still prevalent over rational thought and this is having been in full and open hysterical progress during the COVID-19 pandemic. In places like the United States the President shunned scientific input and rather supported political expediency. They have also driven an agenda of what is termed as fake news. This labelling has nothing to do with fact but is a blurring of editorial and opinion to discredit legitimised journalism. This is a common totalitarian strategy to discredit major factual based reporting organizations and influence people in a polluted nest of conspiracy theories. The primary example of his distortion is the latest presidential elections in the United States.

Eddy Merckx

In the Witwatersrand we are still discovering important history which includes human ancestors and separate races of humanoids. All these caves and discoveries are all withing cycling distance of my home. I have a yellow Eddy Merckx road bike. I acquired it when I was still at Madge Networks and it has been one of my main bicycles through the years. It accompanies me riding round the Cradle of Humankind.

Eddy Merckx is a Belgian considered to be the greatest pro-cyclist ever and was born as the Second World War was being wrapped up. He sells his own line of bicycles and I mine is a prized position. It dominated and won the Argus Cycle tour in the year following democracy in South Africa. He is one of my heroes and his never-equalled domination while cycling led to his nickname, when the daughter of one French racer said, “That Belgian guy, he doesn’t even leave you the crumbs. He’s a real cannibal.” The French magazine Vélo described Merckx as “the most accomplished rider that cycling has ever known.” Merckx, who turned professional in before I was born, won the World Championship thrice, the Tour de France and Giro d’Italia five times each, and the Vuelta a España once.

South Africa is full of quirks. In the middle of our winter, along the east coast we have a sardine run. It occurs from May through July when billions of sardines – or more specifically the Southern African pilchard Sardinops sagax – spawns in the cool waters of the Agulhas Bank and move northward along the east coast. Their sheer numbers create a feeding frenzy along the coastline. Why? No-one knows. When we do it will be like looking at those pictures of the Vredefort Dome from space? My dad told me that many people its life lived that way. They never saw the bigger picture. They are picking at the bones and miss seeing the skeleton. He would say this when we discussed my deviant cousin’s Christian beliefs.

Along the same coast we have the Coelacanth, commonly known as olde four legs. This the most ancient of fish is still alive on planet Earth. It lives at great depths and was assumed to have become extinct 65 million years ago. Then year my mom was born this South African popped out of the depths to tell us different.

Evolution

In the minds of some extreme Christian there is a belief of creation based on biblical interpretations of Genesis, which assume we have only been around seven thousand years. This is one of the fundamental beliefs of the Kwasizbantu cult. Notwithstanding our existences as humanoid based life in this area of the Witwatersrand for three hundred thousand years and the legacy of the millions of years of the Coelacanth, and the billions of years of the Vredefort Dome, there are those groups of fundamentalist Christians who disparage it as fake. This is a view not based on scientific observation or deductive reasoning but irrational belief. I am not a part of the Christian grouping and yet even though I have an affinity for the tradition and moral messaging, I always feel alienated as a result. The binary decisions to be called a Christian based on myths are unpalatable as invariable any admittance to acceptable of rational science is viewed as being a heretic.

I am a heretic.

Ronald Bartels | LinkedIn | Instagram

Some unexpected twists & turns

It was a crisp Sunday morning in January, the kind where the air still carries the night’s memory but promises the heat of the day ahead. I rose before 6 a.m. and made my way to George & Sal’s home in the sleepy town of Henley on Klip which was still dead to the world. eddy, my faithful bike, was ready, his frame the vibrant yellow of sun-ripened mielies, wheels pumped to a solid bar, gleaming under the faint light of the rising sun. I loaded him into the car with the quiet efficiency of habit, careful not to wake anyone in the house as I left Douglasdale.

By the time I launched from the Herbert’s driveway in Henley on Klip, the town was utterly still, not a soul stirring. The roads there are pocked with rather rude slowdown bumps. The first one caught me off guard, smashing my nuts. I cursed, a sharp expletive echoing in the empty streets. Lucky for me, no one was awake to hear it.

As I rolled out of town, the landscape opened up into the first mielie fields, their green stalks swaying gently, already heavy with emerging seeds and pods. I breathed deep, inhaling that fresh, leafy scent, earthy & alive, the essence of the Highveld in summer. It invigorated me, chasing away the remnants of sleep.

I was in a thinking mood as I’m a morning person. The questions from the Jerries about kwaSizabantu swirled around in my head. The shunning & abandonment by them of their own flesh & blood weighed on me. I also recalled some other unrelated emails I had come across over time (one from the previous day) and even my boss at Investec. All that behaviour crystallized in awareness on some random spot of tar outside the town. I finally understood what gaslighting meant. That is why eddy is better than any shrink’s couch.

I turned down Blommendal Road, passing the towering Sentech radio masts, silent sentinels from some bygone era of transmissions. I hadn’t a clue if they were still active, but they stood there imposingly against the dawn sky. The road was deserted, not a car in sight, save for the endless parade of birds perched on the power lines running parallel. They eyed me as I cycled past, heads cocked like spectators at Centre Court Wimbledon, judging my form with avian indifference.

Just beyond the towers, I stumbled upon a serene pond flanked by graceful willow trees. It was teeming with life: red bishops and weavers darting about, their calls a symphony of chirps and whistles. I pulled over and watched for a good ten minutes, mesmerized by the flurry of color and sound. But reality tugged at me, there were still 35 kilometers to crank. I saddled up and pressed on.

The road ahead led toward the distant silhouette of Suikerbosrand, its hills a hazy promise on the horizon. Unbeknownst to me, I’d timed my ride with the Fast One cycle race, and suddenly I was swept into the pack, a huffing, puffing crowd of riders clipping along at a brisk pace. For the next 15 kilometers, the solitude of my solo adventure gave way to camaraderie. I chatted with a bloke on a Trek from 1990, a relic even older than eddy, its frame bearing the scars of countless miles. Then there was the lady on a sleek purple machine, an exorbitantly expensive Italian job that screamed precision engineering. I’d love to ride that, I thought, admiring its lines as we pedaled side by side. Well, truth be told the whole package was good & I’m not talking about the bike. Say no more.

Eventually, the race veered north, and I had to deviate back towards Henley on Klip. The route took me through the dairy farms of Randvaal, where even on a Sunday, the tractors hummed in the fields and cows milled about the feed pens, lowing softly. Milk trucks lumbered out from the farms, merging onto the roads with the hiss of releasing air brakes, the only sounds piercing the quiet, alongside eddy’s rumbling wheels on the tar and the wind whispering over my helmet.

Crossing the bridge over the Klip River into the Randvaal dorp, I spotted a shoeless girl in a yellow dress standing on the railing, arms flung high, screaming and crying downstream. Her anguish cut through the morning calm. I hesitated, my pedals slowing for a moment. But it wasn’t my problem, or so I told myself, & I pushed on.

Randvaal’s roads were a minefield of potholes, demanding constant vigilance as I dodged and weaved. I passed the local shops: a bottle store already open for business, a butcher with its shutters up, & a convenience store called the House Wife, whose goods spilled out onto makeshift shelves on the pavement. The people here wore their poverty plainly in threadbare clothes, converging on the shops with purposeful strides. Outside the bottle store, an old, weathered man sat in a wheelchair, swigging brandy straight from the bottle. Beside him, under the shade of a gnarly tree, a group of men in dirty overalls nursed tins of Castle beer, their laughter rough and resigned. It wasn’t even mid morning yet but I assume someone had seen a Boeing. I thought I’d seen it all, but then I had to swerve around a lady cruising down the middle of the road on one of those sit-on electric karts meant for the elderly or impaired, there was no pavement to speak of. At the corner, as I turned onto the road back to Henley, there stood an Assembly of God church, its service in full swing. Outside, a lineup of vintage cars gleamed in the sun: Ford Cortinas, Datsun ZZZ models & a herd of Hiluxes, bliksem, what a sight.

The final stretch wheeled me alongside the railway tracks, with a mine on the near side, its dumps of gravel rising like artificial hills. Occasionally, I’d glimpse railway trucks piled high with the stuff,. Back in Henley, I hit an unexpected detour, a work crew clearing a massive fallen gum tree that blocked the main road. On the alternate path, I spotted a shop called Durban Delicious and made a mental note to swing by on my way home for some bunny chow. It lived up to its name later that day.

Wheels down back at George & Sal’s, I savored a banana and a steaming cup of tea, the simple rewards of effort. We had a long chat about Grey College. I told them about the Wit Olifant incident, the water hydrant fiasco but ran out of time for the whole shebang. That 50-kilometer loop had been excellent, raw, real, & full of the unexpected rhythms of a South African Sunday.

Ronald Bartels | LinkedIn | Instagram

Sunday Morning Snot

This morning I lay in bed with a blocked nose & told eddy there was no ride at the Cradle Loop.

Ek is vol snot, eddy.

“I know,” he said. “We’re in the same bedroom, boet.”

Damn grumpy Belgium bicycle.

So I stayed put, staring at the ceiling, & the mind did what it does on slow Sundays, drifted back to the road trips to Christiana. It’s a good run through the vlaktes. Nothing flashy, just open sky, long horizons, and that particular Highveld quiet that settles once you leave the Magaliesberg behind.

In Christiana there’s an old steel bridge with lattice work across the Vaal. I have no idea of its exact age, but these single-lane iron structures are scattered all over the country, survivors from a time when rivers still dictated the pace of travel. The one at Christiana feels about the same scale as the bridge over the Tugela at Tugela Ferry. As a kid we crossed that one often on the way to visit my mom’s cousin Boet & his wife Loretta on their farm Steinthal, near Helpmekaar south of Dundee. I’d sleep in an old bed in the rondavel & wake to skaaptjops for breakfast. Man, those breakfasts were legendary.

The road to Christiana meanders past Ventersdorp & Wolmaransstad. Along the way the eucalyptus blue gums & firs stand gnarly and windswept, most of them looking like landscape portraits. There’s a spot where five of them rise in silhouette against the horizon in a mealie field. They look like the horsemen of the apocalypse.

Just leaving Magaliesberg on the road out to Ventersdorp is an Engen. I stop there for water or a coffee. About eighty kilometres further I usually need a comfort break. Next to the road stands one of those sentinel trees heavy with weaver nests, some of the nests already lying on the ground around the trunk. Decades of old glass bottles litter the grass. This stop has been popular for ages. The plastic ones are fewer; they get burnt and melted in the roadside fires.

You cover the distances between maize silos on every horizon. Occasionally the mealies give way to sunflower fields, magnificent when they’re in bloom. In the Magaliesberg you still see Hartebeest. Closer to Wolmaransstad the game changes: Roan antelope, Wildebeest, Springbok. Skirt the detour past Klerksdorp & there’s a field of albino Springbok. I used to pull over & stare. Now I just drive past & barely give them a second glance. There’s also an abandoned uranium mine out that way, & those large microwave towers that once carried the voice traffic between north & south in the seventies, eighties and nineties.

Around the farms near Christiana you’ll find coffee-coloured Springbok & even black ones, plus plenty of Nyala. The town itself sits among large potato farms & pecan nut orchards, a school friend of mine has one right next to the Vaal. Christiana is full of potholes. When you sit beside the river it feels almost biblical, like the Euphrates or the Tigris, slow & wide & indifferent. By the Rivers of Babylon.

There isn’t much else on the road except an excellent padstal just before Wolmaransstad. Proper food. Gourmet burger if you’re lucky.

I’ve continued down that road all the way to Kimberley before. It’s a scenic town still carrying its Victorian bones, red-brick mansions with deep verandahs & metal lacework, the kind of houses built when diamond money flowed thick & fast. The Belgravia suburb is full of them, status symbols from the mining-magnate days, complete with turrets, parapets and those distinctive Kimberley bricks. The Town Hall on Market Square is pure late-Victorian swagger. The Big Hole still sits there like an open wound of history. And yes, Kimberley has proper thrift stores, the kind where you can lose an afternoon hunting for something that once belonged to someone who lived through the diamond rush.

eddy interrupted the daydream.

“Next week Mastelek. No excuses. We crank the loop.”

Right.

Ronald Bartels | LinkedIn | Instagram

The cycling Church

Everyone knows the story: Saul, the persecutor, riding toward Damascus full of certainty and rage, is knocked flat by a blinding light, hears the voice of Christ, and rises as Paul, new name, new eyes, new life. A single moment on a dusty road rewrites a man forever.

My own Damascus moment never came in a flash of light. It came in kilometres. And it comes not once but each time I’m on eddy. I believe Saul had his redemption as the journey changed him, it focused attention to the core of his humanity. My dad Mastelek mkhulu said that the core of Christian values was not to pick at the bones while the whole skeleton was untouched and ignored. On that journey, Saul addressed the skeleton and became Peter.

About twelve kilometres in, when the air thins and the tar starts to rise in the Magaliesberg, the world shrinks to three things: the road, my lungs, and the taste of salt on my lips. The legs are beginning to burn, the heart is hammering like it wants to leave my chest, and the sweat pours off my head in rivers. The wind dries it almost as fast as it falls, leaving that sharp, salty taste of it I have come to crave.

That is when the noise stops. The unpaid bills, the arguments, the endless small humiliations of daily life—they simply fall away, shed like the dead skin of a malting African Rock Python. What remains is astonishingly clear, stripped down to bone truth, the skeleton. I know exactly who I am, what matters, and what does not. Redemption, for me, tastes like salt and effort.

I ride an old yellow Eddy Merckx which I bought second-hand from Gary Beneke, the year he won the Argus. Gary had already pushed that frame to glory; I have added nearly thirty years more. The paint is chipped, the bartape has been replaced so many times, but the bike, Eddy, still feels alive under me. He has carried me through marriage, moments of loss, death, the birth of children, triumphs I bragged about and failures I never admitted. He has never once asked me to be better than I am, only to keep cranking. In that, he has been the most reliable saviour I have ever known. The yellow stead has become one of my heirlooms that define me, just like any sacred item revered by the Navajo.

Sometimes, climbing the long hills towards Hekpoort or the Cradle, I pass other cyclists. They nod or lift a hand off the bars in greeting. We do not know each other’s names, politics, sins, or bank balances. Yet in that moment we are closer than family. We are all in Church, sweating our prayers into the tar, finding whatever grace is available to people who refuse to stay still.

That is my road to Damascus, tarmac instead of dust, a yellow Belgian frame instead of a horse, salt instead of blinding light. And every time I ride it, I come back changed, even if only by a millimetre. Over decades, those millimetres add up to a different man.

Paul got his revelation in an instant. I find mine in the Cradle of Humankind under the dancing clouds of the Highveld escarpment.

Ronald Bartels | LinkedIn | Instagram

Snot en trane

I had no business being there. Nearly sixty years on the clock, and a body that sometimes creaks like the old floorboards of the dusty farmhouse on Oakvilla farm, and yet there I was on the evening of the December full moon, clicking into my pedals outside Biden, ready for the full-moon social ride with Cal and Eddy. The three of us. No pressure. Just the quiet promise of a night ride in the Magaliesburg and whatever the world felt like giving us.

I warmed up alone on the tar from Biden to Avianto. The road was still warm from the day’s sun, and as I rolled through the stone gates I saw it: another wedding in the chapel and guests milling in the garden. White draping, candles, a bride in a dress that caught the last of the sunset. Exactly like ours, twenty-six years earlier, almost to the day. I stopped pedalling and reflected, watching the couple take their photographs under the same trees. Snot en trane. It was the same grief hallucination that you hear in that awesome Irish ballad, Molly Malone. I mounted eddy, wiped my face with the back of my hand, and rode on before anyone noticed the old fart blubbering at the side of the tar.

The Cradle Loop started properly after that. Tar met singing wheels, gradient kicked up, and the young guns in the bunch started cranking like tomorrow was cancelled. I told myself I’d just sit in, take it steady, survive. But something stubborn woke up in my legs. I stayed on the wheels. Up the drags, through the sweeping corners, over the rolls—I matched them. Cal looked across at one point and just shook his head, grinning. I was screaming at Eddy for one last hurrah. I felt ridiculously alive.

And then the moon came.

It crested the ridge behind us like someone had hung a lantern the size of a small planet in the sky. Not rose—crested. One moment the horizon was dark, the next it was on fire with this huge, low, impossible gold-white disc. This was no ordinary full moon. This was the Cold Moon, the last supermoon of the year, and it had lined up perfectly with a major lunar standstill—the same rare wobble in the moon’s orbit that made the ancient builders align Stonehenge the way they did. Once every couple of decades the moon swings to its most extreme northerly and southerly points. When that extreme coincides with perigee (the moon’s closest approach to Earth), you get something that is generational and won’t in all probability be seen again by me.

It looked close enough to touch. The craters were sharp, the glow almost harsh, yet soft at the edges like candlelight. It threw our shadows ahead of us on the road, long and black and dancing. The bush around us was whispering in worship. Every leaf, every blade of grass, every thorn tree stood out in perfect silhouette. We rode in silence for a long stretch, because what do you say when the sky is doing something that feels older than language?

Eventually the road spat us out back at the finish. Someone had fired up the pizza oven. We sat on hay bales, legs wrecked, hands wrapped around cold beers, eating wood-fired pizzas that were properly rural—charred crusts, fresh rocket, goat’s cheese, figs from the tree overhead. Crunchy, smoky, perfect.

Another old fella wandered over, helmet in hand, smiling. Kevin. Turned out he’s quite the fan of eddy. He was one of those I dropped when the eddy testosterone triggered. He sat with us a while, recounting the exact moment the moon cleared the hills—“I promise you, my boet, I nearly rode off the tar”. He told us he’ll be back next month to try and hang onto our wheels again. I believed him.

That night will stay burned behind my eyes for whatever years I have left. The wedding that made me cry, the legs that refused to quit, riding under a moon that felt like it had come specifically to show off for us. And Kevin’s quiet promise in the firelight: “See you again when we go cranking the Magaliesburg.”

Ja. We’ll be there.

Ronald Bartels | LinkedIn | Instagram

Today S, T and I Planned to play the new overwatch drives. We got hard shit on every single game. We changed roles. We changed heroes everything. We ended up like two wins eight losses. S finally called it and got off to go to bed, and then T and I went on an eight game win streak. S wasn’t doing bad at all, it is honestly pure luck and we kept playing with the same people and we had really good synergy, but it’s so fucking funny to me.

An American Conference Game.

My Friday's game of choice finds the (3-4) Tulane Green Wave football team traveling to the University of North Carolina at Charlotte to play the (1-6) Charlotte 49ers in an American Conference game scheduled to start at 6:00 PM CT. I should be able to listen to at least the first half, and maybe the whole game before sleep takes me away.

And the adventure continues.

Meer en meer zijn het Graaiend in afvalbakken Ieder blikje telt.

i didnt write yesterday because i have a big surprise to tell you, well, if im being honest. ive always come up with random surprises that shock us both. but this one is rather unexpected. i’ve fixed my sleep schedule. yes. you read that correctly. my sleep schedule. fixed. im just as surprised as you are, believe me. its quite amusing when i think about it. a few days ago, i was here complaining about insomnia, then sleeping at nine in the morning and waking up somewhere around seven in the evening, generally behaving like a creature that has no business being awake during daylight. id spend the night staring at the ceiling, then spend the day sleeping through whatever unfortunate responsibilities i had. a rather impressive arrangement, really. one id been committed to for quite some time. but now? gone. fixed. usually, fixing my sleep schedule requires more effort than im willing to put into most things. but, miracles do happen. actually, now that ive written it down, im less excited about it. thats disappointing. i had this lovely little surprise sitting in my head, and now that ive spilled it all over this page, it feels rather ordinary. maybe i should have kept my mouth.. well, in that case. my hands shut. a rare much rare opportunity wasted on an audience that doesnt even pay admission. anyway, i guess thats enough writing for today. i have nothing left to report.

Sincerely, Who might ruin his sleep after this.

For as long as automation has had a sales pitch, the pitch has been the same. The machines will take the drudgery. They will fill in the forms, file the reports, chase the invoices and reconcile the spreadsheets, and in doing so they will hand back to human beings the parts of work that are interesting, creative and their own. Strategy, design, ideas. The good stuff.

A paper presented at the 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, held in Barcelona from 13 to 17 April, suggests that the pitch may have the order of events backwards. Its title asks the question bluntly: “Are We Automating the Joy Out of Work? Designing AI to Augment Work, Not Meaning”. Its authors are Jaspreet Ranjit and Swabha Swayamdipta of the University of Southern California, Ke Zhou of Nokia Bell Labs and the University of Nottingham, and Daniele Quercia of Nokia Bell Labs and the Politecnico di Torino. Their central finding, in the words of the abstract, is this: “Worryingly, we find that tasks that workers associate with a sense of agency or happiness may be disproportionately exposed to AI.”

Not the tedious tasks. The ones people like.

The authors go further. A central risk of AI, they argue, is not mass unemployment but what they call mass demoralisation: “a loss of meaning and ownership in day-to-day work”. As models generate more of the early-stage output, they write, the visible creative steps can start to feel machine-made, while the human contribution becomes rushed, under-resourced and difficult to see.

That is a different kind of warning from the one that has dominated the debate about AI and jobs. It is not about whether people will have work. It is about what work will be like for the people who keep it. And it raises two questions that most organisations deploying AI have not yet seriously asked. What happens to a person's relationship with their craft when the parts of the job they found most fulfilling are the first to be handed to a machine, and what is left is the emotional and relational upkeep? And if the danger is demoralisation rather than displacement, who should decide which parts of a job get automated?

How the researchers mapped meaning onto ten thousand tasks

The study starts with the US Department of Labor's Occupational Information Network, known as O*NET, which breaks every American occupation into short task statements. The researchers narrowed this universe to tasks performed mainly on a computer, carried out daily or weekly, and ones that workers on the research platform Prolific were highly familiar with. That produced a representative sample of 171 tasks across 22 occupations.

They then surveyed two groups. The first was 202 workers who actually performed those tasks. Each rated their tasks against dimensions drawn from a scoping review of research on meaningful work: whether a task felt pointless or valuable, whether it called for novel ideas, gave them freedom or made them happy, and whether it built relationships or required emotional awareness or in-person contact. The second group was 197 developers who build AI systems, who were asked what traits they would design into an AI tool for each task.

To scale the analysis beyond 171 tasks, the team prompted language models to simulate the ratings, checked how closely the simulated ratings matched the human ones, and, finding reasonable agreement, generated annotations for 10,131 tasks across 512 occupations and 19 sectors. They report that only 0.87 per cent of tasks showed a large gap, of two points or more on a five-point scale, between model and human ratings, and that their main patterns held when they reran the analysis using only the human ratings.

To decide which tasks counted as “exposed” to AI, the researchers used a patent-based measure developed by Ali Akbar Septiandri, Marios Constantinides and Quercia, published in PNAS Nexus in 2024, which matched descriptions of tens of thousands of AI patents filed with the US Patent and Trademark Office against O*NET task statements. Tasks above a threshold on that measure were classed as likely to be exposed. Restricting the analysis to computer-based work left 3,179 tasks in the likely-to-be-exposed group and 2,349 in the comparison group.

The parts of the job that machines reach first

The comparison between those two groups is where the paper becomes uncomfortable. Tasks likely to be exposed to AI were more strongly associated by workers with novelty and creativity, with positive feelings and with autonomy. The researchers say directly that this “challenges the usual narrative that automation mainly targets routine tasks”. Tasks less likely to be exposed were associated with emotional awareness, in-person interaction, relationship building and social connection.

The sector picture sharpens the point. The heaviest exposure of creative, high-agency work fell in Arts, Architecture and Engineering, Computer and Mathematics, and the Life, Physical and Social Sciences. The examples the paper draws from O*NET are telling: an art director “formulating basic layout design”; an actuary “constructing probability tables for natural disasters”. These are first passes, the authors note, of the kind that models can now credibly generate, with humans refining the output afterwards. Meanwhile, in Education, Sales, Community and Social Services and Healthcare, the work that remained less exposed involved activities such as guiding students through tangled academic and personal problems, or “presenting offers while preserving relationships”.

The authors read this as a reversal of the expected trajectory. Generative systems, they observe, already draft text, suggest layouts, start campaigns, run simulations and infer likely emotional responses. In their data, these uses line up with tasks that workers describe as meaningful precisely because they reflect taste and authorship. AI is not confined to chores. It is becoming entangled with the moments where people feel they add something of themselves.

There is a second finding that matters for anyone building the tools. Workers and developers disagreed about what an AI system should be like. Workers wanted systems that were straightforward, tolerant and practical. Developers said they would design systems that were polite, strict and imaginative. The single biggest gap was between straightforwardness and politeness, and it was widest in Production, Architecture and Engineering, and the sciences, where vagueness can mean wasted materials or flawed data. “In high-risk contexts,” the authors write, “the ethical choice may well be the blunt one, and the useful thing to say may be short.” Developers, they suggest, tend to romanticise creativity as a frontier capability, while many workers in structured, routine jobs simply want a tool that spots anomalies and sticks to the rules.

Put the two findings together and the problem comes into focus. The AI that is arriving is being built to be imaginative, and it is landing on the imaginative parts of the job.

Why exposure is not the same as replacement

It is worth being precise about what the study measures. “Exposure” does not mean a task has been automated, or even that it will be. The authors define it as tasks that current or near-term AI could plausibly perform or substantially speed up. It is a statement about technological reach, not about deployment decisions inside any particular firm, and the paper separates automation, where AI performs a task end to end, from augmentation, where humans keep primary responsibility.

The researchers are also candid about their limitations. The study covers only US occupational tasks. Prolific participants tend to be more technologically literate than average, so low-wage and non-digital work may be underrepresented. O*NET task statements are short summaries that different workers may picture differently. The scaling to 10,131 tasks relies on language-model ratings, which the authors treat as an approximation of human responses rather than as ground truth, and which they found to be more uniform and optimistic in some sectors. Even the creativity finding has a wrinkle. When the analysis was rerun on human ratings of the original 171 tasks alone, humans and models agreed on six of the seven significant dimensions; the exception was “requires novel ideas or creativity”, where the authors suggest human annotators tended to underestimate the novelty of tasks.

None of this undoes the core pattern. But the study is best read as a map of where pressure is likely to fall, not a ledger of what has already been lost. What actually happens to people's work is decided later, by managers, vendors and product teams.

From mass unemployment to mass demoralisation

Why should the location of the pressure matter so much? Because meaning in work is not spread evenly across a job. It clusters.

The sociologist Richard Sennett, in his 2008 book The Craftsman, described craftsmanship as the basic human impulse to do a job well for its own sake, and argued that this impulse extends far beyond the workshop, to programmers, doctors and artists. Craft, in that sense, lives in the moments of making: the first sketch, the opening paragraph, the elegant solution to a modelling problem.

If those moments are exactly where AI exposure is concentrated, then a job can be automated in a peculiar way. The worker keeps the job title, the salary and most of the hours. What disappears is the part that made them want the job in the first place. In the paper's own examples, the basic layout and the first probability table are precisely the drafts a model can now produce; what is left to the human is refinement. This is the scenario Ranjit and her colleagues have in mind when they describe a loss of ownership. The creative steps that others can see now appear to come from the machine, while the human's contribution moves into the background, squeezed for time and harder for anyone to credit.

There is already experimental evidence that this dynamic has psychological costs. In a 2025 paper in Scientific Reports, Suqing Wu, Yukun Liu, Mengqi Ruan, Siyu Chen and Xiao-Yun Xie of the School of Management at Zhejiang University reported four online experiments with a total of 3,562 participants. Working with generative AI improved immediate performance on professional tasks. But that performance boost did not carry over when people subsequently worked alone, and the switch from AI collaboration to solo work was accompanied by significant decreases in intrinsic motivation and increases in boredom, even as participants' sense of control rose. The authors' summary is succinct: collaboration with generative AI “enhances immediate task performance but can undermine long-term psychological experiences of human workers.”

Creative workers are already reporting effects outside the laboratory. A survey by the Society of Authors, the UK trade union for writers, illustrators and translators, received 787 responses in early 2024. A quarter of illustrators, 26 per cent, and more than a third of translators, 36 per cent, said they had already lost work to generative AI. The survey was self-reported and drawn from a membership sample, so it cannot measure the market as a whole. But it captures the sense, among people whose identities are bound up with a craft, that the craft itself is being lifted out of their hands.

What the remaining work asks of people

If the creative core of a job is thinned out, what is left? According to the CHI study, the tasks least exposed to AI are those built on emotional awareness, in-person presence and relationship building. That might sound like a reassuring residue. Machines draft, humans connect. But it is worth looking at what those remaining tasks involve.

In 1983, the sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild of the University of California, Berkeley, published The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling, which introduced the idea of emotional labour. Studying flight attendants and bill collectors, she described public-facing jobs in which managing feelings was part of what the employer was paying for. Flight attendants had to be, in the phrase used by her publisher, “nicer than natural”; bill collectors had to be “nastier than natural”. Hochschild's concern was that this kind of work, done for commercial purposes, could estrange people from their own feelings.

Relational work is not inherently draining. For many teachers, nurses, social workers and salespeople, the relationships are the point of the job, and the CHI data suggest that workers do regard these tasks as meaningful. The danger lies in the mix. A job that once combined making things with tending to people can become one that is mostly tending to people, with the making delegated. The remaining human work then has a distinctive profile: smoothing over the AI's output with clients, absorbing complaints, reassuring colleagues, maintaining relationships that the automated parts of the workflow no longer support. That is emotional labour, and much of it is invisible in the way that a finished design or a well-built model is not.

The Stanford University researchers behind the WORKBank database, Yijia Shao, Humishka Zope, Yucheng Jiang, Jiaxin Pei, David Nguyen, Erik Brynjolfsson and Diyi Yang, found a related signal in a 2025 study of 1,500 workers across 844 tasks in 104 occupations. Their results, they wrote, offer early signals that AI agents may reshape core human competencies, “shifting from information-focused skills to interpersonal ones.” The CHI paper adds a warning that this shift may not be benign. Among its design examples is the risk that teachers, managers and clinicians who use AI for canned replies and templated feedback end up making their communication with students, staff or patients feel more generic. If AI pushes people towards relational work while also hollowing out that relational work with templates, the worker is squeezed from both sides.

When the most fulfilling parts of a job are automated first, then, a person's relationship with their craft is put at risk in two ways. They lose authorship of the work that once expressed their skill and taste. And they are left with a larger share of work whose value is real but less visible and more emotionally costly. Whether that produces demoralisation depends on what else changes, and here a very different body of evidence becomes useful.

Lessons from people who stopped working

In September 2026, four researchers at Google DeepMind, Stephanie C.Y. Chan, Adam Bales, Katherine L. Hermann and Iason Gabriel, posted a review titled “Work, Wellbeing, and Choice: Empirical Lessons for AI Futures”. Their question was not what AI does to work, but what decades of research reveal about people who live without it. They drew on psychological, sociological and economic studies of the unemployed, retirees, lottery winners, financially dependent spouses and citizens of Gulf states with guaranteed public-sector employment, covering OECD countries, China, India and the Gulf.

Their findings are stark in places. Involuntary job loss harms life satisfaction, mental health, physical health and even mortality, and the damage can last: some studies find psychological “scarring” that persists for years after people find work again. Yet the vast majority of lottery winners, between 85 and 89 per cent across studies of American and Swedish winners, keep working, typically using their windfall to buy flexibility rather than to quit. And retirees, who are also not working, often report high and sustained wellbeing.

The authors draw on the work of the social psychologist Marie Jahoda, whose 1982 book Employment and Unemployment, published by Cambridge University Press, argued that a job provides “latent” benefits alongside its “manifest” purpose of earning a living. Jahoda identified time structure, social contact, status and identity, regular activity and collective purpose. The DeepMind review finds that both income and some of these latent benefits matter, and adds cognitive health: retirement has been causally linked to declines in cognitive ability.

To explain why the unemployed and the retired fare so differently, the review identifies three factors that mediate the relationship between work status and wellbeing. The first is agency and choice: whether the exit from work was voluntary, and whether people retain agency over the long term. The second is the availability of alternative sources of work's latent benefits, such as volunteering, hobbies or state-provided employment. The third is social and systemic context, including cultural norms around work and the strength of safety nets.

The evidence on each is striking. Between 20 and 30 per cent of retirees perceive their retirement as forced, and across countries those who retired voluntarily report significantly better physical and mental wellbeing than those who did not, even after controlling for health, income and other factors. Volunteering confers benefits at remarkably low doses, with gains for older adults observable from about one hour a week. One study cited in the review found that plant closures produced an almost four-fold greater increase in depression among American workers than among European workers, who have stronger safety nets. And the psychological cost of losing work tends to fall harder on men, which the authors attribute to stronger social pressure to conform to norms about working.

“Many policy discussions about AI futures focus on the availability of work or the availability of resources,” the authors write. “However, these discussions overlook the fact that it matters deeply whether people get to choose their path.” Their summary of the policy lesson is equally direct: purely material interventions such as universal basic income “are valuable but highly insufficient”.

Applying the exit evidence inside the job

The DeepMind review is about people who leave work altogether. But its three factors translate remarkably well to what happens when people stay in work and lose part of it. Demoralisation, in the CHI paper's sense, is a kind of partial exit: a withdrawal not from employment but from the meaningful core of a role. Read that way, the review's factors become a diagnostic for when task automation is likely to hurt.

Start with agency. A critical determinant of wellbeing in the review is not whether people work, but whether they chose their situation. Inside a job, the equivalent question is whether workers chose which of their tasks were handed to AI. The Society of Authors survey hints at the distinction: alongside those who chose to use generative AI, 5 per cent of illustrators and 8 per cent of translators said they had used it because their publisher or commissioning organisation asked them to. The CHI paper notes that, in practice, managers, vendors and technical teams, not workers, usually decide which tasks are exposed to AI and how far automation goes. “Managers, vendors, and technical teams make these decisions before workers can consent or take part, especially in roles with low bargaining power,” the authors write. That is the workplace version of involuntary exit.

Next, alternatives. Retirees do well when they find other sources of structure, status and purpose. Workers who lose the creative core of their job need somewhere else for those things to come from: new responsibilities with real authorship, protected time for the work they value, recognition for the judgement involved in steering and correcting AI output. If the time freed by automation is simply filled with more volume, the latent benefits drain away without replacement.

Finally, context and safety nets. The review shows that the same loss lands very differently depending on norms and institutional support. Inside an organisation, the analogue is culture and protection: whether people who push back on a deployment are heard or penalised, whether those whose roles shrink are offered retraining or redeployment, and whether the organisation measures anything other than throughput.

This is an analogy, not a finding. Neither paper tested it, and evidence about the unemployed cannot be transplanted wholesale onto people still in work. But the convergence is hard to ignore. Working from inside jobs, one paper finds that agency, ownership and meaning matter; working from outside, the other finds that choice, alternatives and context matter. Both suggest the damage depends less on what is taken away than on how.

Workers already say what they want automated

The good news is that workers are not, in general, opposed to automation. They are opposed to the wrong automation.

The WORKBank study asked its 1,500 workers which of their tasks they would like AI agents to take on. For 46.1 per cent of tasks, workers expressed positive attitudes towards automation, even after being prompted to reflect on job loss and on how much they enjoyed the work. Their main motivation was to free up time for higher-value work. The researchers then compared those desires with experts' assessments of what AI could currently do, sorting tasks into four zones: a “Green Light” zone where workers wanted automation and the technology could deliver it; a “Red Light” zone where the technology was capable but workers did not want it; an R&D opportunity zone where workers wanted help that the technology could not yet provide; and a low-priority zone.

Their most pointed finding concerned where the money was going. Mapping the tasks targeted by Y Combinator start-ups, they found that 41.0 per cent of company-task mappings were concentrated in the Low Priority and “Red Light” zones. A large share of the industry's effort, in other words, was aimed at tasks workers either did not care about or actively wanted to keep.

Combined with the CHI paper's developer-worker mismatch, the pattern is clear. Workers do not resist AI. Their preferences are simply rarely the input that shapes what gets built.

A test for choosing which task clusters to automate

If the risk is demoralisation, then the usual test for automation, which asks whether a task can be done faster or cheaper by a machine, is incomplete. It needs a second question: what does this task mean to the people who do it? Drawing on the two papers and the evidence around them, an organisation could reasonably weigh at least four considerations before automating a cluster of tasks.

The first is meaning. Ask the people who do the work which tasks they find meaningful, enjoyable or expressive of their skill, and which they find pointless. The CHI study shows that this can be measured at scale with straightforward survey instruments. WORKBank shows that workers can distinguish clearly between tasks they want help with and tasks they want to keep. Tasks that workers rate low on meaning and high on tedium are the obvious first candidates. Tasks rated high on creativity, autonomy and happiness deserve a heavier burden of justification.

The second is order. The CHI authors propose that, for creative work, the sequence matters as much as the division of labour. Their design heuristics include starting creative fields empty, so that a human sketch, prompt or outline exists before AI suggestions appear; offering several alternatives rather than a single finished replacement; letting workers accept or reject AI content sentence by sentence rather than through a single “replace all”; and allowing a worker to tick a box marked “I want to do this part myself”. The question for an organisation is not simply whether AI touches a creative task, but whether the human still makes the first move.

The third is what replaces the time saved. The DeepMind review's evidence on alternative sources of meaning suggests that automation which frees time is only beneficial if that time goes somewhere that sustains structure, status and purpose. For relational work, the CHI paper suggests using AI to prepare briefs and summaries so the human arrives better informed, assigning it to silent roles such as note-taking during live interactions, and reserving protected time for direct human engagement. Its proposed measures of success are telling: workers reporting that AI helps them “show up prepared” rather than “speak for me”, and that it does not “take away the good parts” of the job.

The fourth is measurement. The CHI authors recommend tracking, during deployment, whether workers still feel in control and whether the output “still feels like my work”, alongside conventional measures of speed and quality. They also suggest logging the level of assistance AI provides, from suggestion to draft to execution, and recording who made the final decision. Over time, they argue, workers' self-reported skills and confidence in their core craft should remain stable or improve. If those indicators fall while productivity rises, the organisation has learned something its dashboards would otherwise hide.

None of this means creative tasks should never be automated. Some workers will welcome help with the very tasks others prize, and the CHI data show wide variation between sectors. The point is that meaning should be treated as a real cost in the decision, not as a sentimental afterthought.

Giving workers a binding say

That leaves the second half of the question: what voice should workers have? The CHI paper's answer is explicit. Beyond designing interfaces that let individuals retain control within a task, the authors argue that organisations should give workers some say over which task clusters are candidates for automation. Without such mechanisms, they warn, “AI exposure risks deepening existing power imbalances.” They point to remedies from research on algorithmic management: direct involvement of workers and their representatives through formal consultation and collective bargaining over AI deployments, worker or union technology representatives with access to information about how systems allocate and evaluate work, and transparency tools that help workers understand and contest automated decisions.

There are working precedents. The most prominent came from Hollywood. The 2023 Minimum Basic Agreement between the Writers Guild of America and the major studios established that AI cannot be considered a writer and that material it produces cannot be treated as literary material. Under its terms, a writer may choose to use AI with the company's consent, but the guild's own summary states plainly that “the company can't require the writer to use AI software (e.g., ChatGPT) when performing writing services.” Companies must disclose when material given to a writer was generated by AI. In effect, the writers bargained over which parts of their craft would remain theirs. That agreement has since been succeeded by the 2026 contract, ratified on 24 April 2026 with 90.38% of votes in favour and running to 1 May 2030, which “preserves all of the protections negotiated in 2023”. It adds one more: companies must give the guild written notice when they license writers' work to train a commercial generative AI system, after which the guild can request a discussion about the licence, including any payment to writers. It does not establish payment for training.

European law offers a thinner but broader floor. Article 26(7) of the EU Artificial Intelligence Act, adopted in 2024, requires that, before a high-risk AI system is put into service or used at the workplace, “deployers who are employers shall inform workers' representatives and the affected workers” that they will be subject to it. That is a duty to inform, not to consult or obtain consent, and it applies only to systems classed as high-risk. It is also not yet in force for most workplace tools: the Digital Omnibus on AI, Regulation (EU) 2026/1744, which took effect on 27 July 2026, deferred the high-risk obligations for Annex III systems, a category that includes employment and worker management, from 2 August 2026 to 2 December 2027. In Germany, works councils have long held co-determination rights over the introduction of technical systems capable of monitoring employees' behaviour or performance, a provision that lawyers widely expect to cover many AI tools. The limits are visible too: in January 2024, the Hamburg Labour Court rejected a works council's application concerning employees' use of ChatGPT, partly because staff used it voluntarily through private accounts in a web browser rather than as an employer-installed system.

These mechanisms share a weakness when it comes to demoralisation. Most were designed to address surveillance, pay or credit, not meaning. The EU provision is triggered by risk classification, not by what a task means to the person who does it. The German right is anchored in monitoring. Even the WGA's protections, including the 2026 notice requirement on training licences, focus on credit and compensation, although by keeping AI out of the definition of a writer, they also protect authorship. A workplace that took the CHI findings seriously would go further: it would give workers a formal role in deciding which task clusters are automated, informed by evidence about which tasks they find meaningful, with a right to revisit the decision once the effects are known.

That voice matters most precisely where it is weakest. The CHI authors note that the decisions about exposure are made before workers can consent, especially in roles with little bargaining power. The DeepMind review cites evidence that, where safety nets are weak, pre-existing wealth becomes a key buffer against the shock of job loss. A model of AI deployment that consults only those with strong unions would protect screenwriters and leave behind most of the people whose tasks appear in the CHI data.

What a craft needs to survive

It is tempting to treat all of this as a soft concern, a matter of morale to be fixed with a workshop. The evidence suggests otherwise. Meaning is not a perk attached to work; it is part of what makes people willing to invest skill and care, and part of what keeps them well. The DeepMind review shows how much is at stake when people lose work altogether. The CHI paper suggests a quieter version of that loss may already be underway inside jobs that look perfectly secure.

The two papers point to the same remedy from opposite directions. What protects people is not the absence of change but the ability to shape it: to choose, to find meaning somewhere else when the old sources move, and to be supported while they do. For organisations, that means treating which tasks to automate as a decision with human costs, made with the people who bear them, rather than a technical question settled by whatever a vendor's model can do.

Ranjit and her co-authors end on a note of possibility. The outcome they describe, they stress, is shaped by design choices, which can in principle be revised: systems could speed up exploration and drafting while people keep authorship, make the final judgements and sustain the relationships that make work meaningful. That is a more humane division of labour than the current pitch implies. But it will not arrive by default. Left to the logic of capability alone, AI will keep flowing towards the tasks it can reach, and those turn out to be the ones people love. Keeping the spark in work will take a deliberate decision about who gets to say which parts of a craft stay human.

References and Sources

1. Ranjit, Jaspreet; Zhou, Ke; Swayamdipta, Swabha; Quercia, Daniele. “Are We Automating the Joy Out of Work? Designing AI to Augment Work, Not Meaning.” Proceedings of the 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '26), Barcelona, Spain, 13-17 April 2026. DOI: 10.1145/3772318.3791845. Preprint arXiv:2603.14963, 16 March 2026. https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.14963 (full text: https://arxiv.org/html/2603.14963)
2. Chan, Stephanie C.Y.; Bales, Adam; Hermann, Katherine L.; Gabriel, Iason. “Work, Wellbeing, and Choice: Empirical Lessons for AI Futures.” Google DeepMind. arXiv:2609.11019, 10 September 2026. https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.11019 (full text: https://arxiv.org/html/2609.11019)
3. Septiandri, Ali Akbar; Constantinides, Marios; Quercia, Daniele. “The potential impact of AI innovations on US occupations.” PNAS Nexus, 3(9), pgae320, September 2024. DOI: 10.1093/pnasnexus/pgae320. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC11421150/
4. Wu, Suqing; Liu, Yukun; Ruan, Mengqi; Chen, Siyu; Xie, Xiao-Yun. “Human-generative AI collaboration enhances task performance but undermines human's intrinsic motivation.” Scientific Reports, 15, article 15105, 29 April 2025. DOI: 10.1038/s41598-025-98385-2. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-025-98385-2
5. Shao, Yijia; Zope, Humishka; Jiang, Yucheng; Pei, Jiaxin; Nguyen, David; Brynjolfsson, Erik; Yang, Diyi. “Future of Work with AI Agents: Auditing Automation and Augmentation Potential across the U.S. Workforce.” arXiv:2506.06576, 6 June 2025 (revised 1 February 2026). https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.06576
6. Hochschild, Arlie Russell. The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling. University of California Press, 1983 (third edition 2012). https://www.ucpress.edu/books/the-managed-heart/paper
7. Jahoda, Marie. Employment and Unemployment: A Social-Psychological Analysis. Cambridge University Press, 1982. ISBN 978-0-521-28586-5. https://ideas.repec.org/b/cup/cbooks/9780521285865.html
8. Sennett, Richard. The Craftsman. Yale University Press, 2008. https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300151190/the-craftsman/
9. The Bookseller. “A third of translators report losing work to generative AI systems, SoA survey reveals.” April 2024. https://thebookseller.com/news/a-third-of-translators-report-losing-work-to-generative-ai-systems-soa-survey-reveals
10. European Writers' Council. “SoA survey UK AI 2024.” April 2024. https://europeanwriterscouncil.eu/soa-survey-uk-ai-2024/
11. Books+Publishing. “A third of translators report losing work due to AI.” 15 April 2024. https://www.booksandpublishing.com.au/articles/2024/04/15/250317/a-third-of-translators-report-losing-work-due-to-ai/
12. Writers Guild of America West. “Know Your Rights: Artificial Intelligence.” https://www.wga.org/contracts/know-your-rights/artificial-intelligence
13. Writers Guild of America. “Summary of the 2023 WGA MBA.” https://wgacontract2023.org/the-campaign/summary-of-the-2023-wga-mba
14. Regulation (EU) 2024/1689 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 13 June 2024 laying down harmonised rules on artificial intelligence (Artificial Intelligence Act), Article 26: Obligations of deployers of high-risk AI systems. https://artificialintelligenceact.eu/article/26/ (Official Journal: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/reg/2024/1689/oj/eng)
15. Littler Mendelson. “Germany: Does the Works Council Have a Say When Employees Use ChatGPT? No, According to the Labor Court Hamburg.” 2024. https://www.littler.com/publication-press/publication/germany-does-works-council-have-say-when-employees-use-chatgpt-no
16. Bird & Bird. “First Judgement on the Rights of Works Councils when Employees use AI Systems.” 2024. https://cm.twobirds.com/en/insights/2024/germany/erstes-urteil-zu-rechten-des-betriebsrats-bei-einsatz-von-kuenstlicher-intelligenz
17. Writers Guild of America. “WGA Ratifies 2026 Minimum Basic Agreement With AMPTP.” 24 April 2026. https://www.wga.org/news-events/news/press/wga-ratifies-2026-minimum-basic-agreement-with-amptp
18. Writers Guild of America. “Summary of the 2026 WGA MBA.” https://www.wga.org/contracts/contracts/mba/summary-of-the-2026-wga-mba
19. Regulation (EU) 2026/1744 amending Regulation (EU) 2024/1689 (Digital Omnibus on AI), in force 27 July 2026. https://artificialintelligenceact.eu/ai-act-explorer/digital-omnibus/

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Tim Green UK-based Systems Theorist & Independent Technology Writer

Tim explores the intersections of artificial intelligence, decentralised cognition, and posthuman ethics. His work, published at smarterarticles.co.uk, challenges dominant narratives of technological progress while proposing interdisciplinary frameworks for collective intelligence and digital stewardship.

His writing has been featured on Ground News and shared by independent researchers across both academic and technological communities.

ORCID: 0009-0002-0156-9795 Email: tim@smarterarticles.co.uk

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