When I was a 20-something big-4 consultant traveling weeks on end for work, I took up smoking for exactly the reasons you suggest. I had nothing to do in my down time and knew nobody, but I could sit in hotel bar with a smoke and strangers would trail over.
Yep, I’m old enough to have been working when you could still smoke in hotel bars. In Monaco you could order a pack of Marlboro Reds at your dinner table back in 2006.
Manus has been the best agent for turning text into work --useable slides, code, extracting data from websites, etc. that I've seen. There are better tools for specific cases like coding, but for one tool that could handle agentic workflows with minimal oversight and configuration, it's the best.
If true, probably not for long. Still my point is people are customer. It’s more fun to think about what won’t change. I think we will still have baristas.
This goes way back. Nine Inch Nails was a synth-first band with the music being written by Trent in a studio on a DAW. That worked but what really made the bad was live shows so they found ways even using 2 drummers to translate the synths and machines into human-plated instruments.
Also way before that back in the early 80’a Depeche Mode displayed the recorded drumb-reel onstage so everyone knew what it was, but when the got big enough they also transitioned into an epic live show with guitars and live drum a as well as synth-hooked drums devices they could bag on in addition to keyboards.
We are human. We want humans. Same reason I want a hipster barista to pour my coffee when a machine could do it just as well.
In San Francisco, you can still find buildings where the elevators have ashtrays, though usually the actual tray is gone.