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\n\tFor a glimpse of turmoil these days, look no further than the nearest office. \u201cIt\u2019s an incipient war zone,\u201d says a McKinsey study.<\/p>\n
\n\tThat\u2019s despite the fact that offices are mostly empty \u2014 both federal and corporate. The MAGA<\/a>-era U.S. government pretends to function despite the absence of its workforce due to layoffs and the prolonged shutdown. Even flights take off with minimal air-traffic controllers.<\/p>\n \n\tMeanwhile, down the block, millions in the private workplace are refusing corporate demands that they return to their offices. Having survived cutbacks and Covid, employees prefer taking Zoom calls at home in their sweat pants rather than coping with traffic or office politics. They also don\u2019t want to read ominous forecasts about incursions from AI<\/a>.<\/p>\n \n\tConfession: I used to like going to the office; others apparently did, too. A benign show called The Office was once a TV hit in the UK and U.S., its characters sharing gossip over the water cooler. Offices brought busy people together for a common purpose. Some even hooked up.<\/p>\n \n\tYet employees today are rebuffing powerhouses like Amazon<\/a>, J.P. Morgan and studios like NBCUniversal <\/a>even as they offer compromises to lure them back.<\/p>\n \n\tDiscovering myself in the minority on the office issue troubled me, so I decided to find a way out: I asked ChatGPT to write an unbiased column in my \u201cvoice\u201d to learn where Peter Bart really stands, or has stood. That\u2019s what\u2019s known today as research.<\/p>\n \n\tWithin a minute or two I was reading that offices presently are a relic \u2014 at least according to my digital avatar\u2019s viewpoint. \u201cCreativity doesn\u2019t need proximity,\u201d I wrote \u2014 apparently.<\/p>\n \n\tMy chatbot even cited a Harvard study declaring: \u201cGen Z executives who were schooled on Zoom and hence addicted to their phones and screens are not coping well with office interaction.\u201d Further, the new \u201copen plan landscape\u201d of offices leaves workers feeling \u201cboth distracted and defenseless.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tWas all this correct? Thinking back on my own scattered past, I actually enjoyed these \u201cdistractions.\u201d I relished the high-decibel exchanges when I was a young member of the news staff of the New York Times. Also the fierce debates voiced by the motion picture production staffs at Paramount or, later, MGM.<\/p>\n \n\tTo be sure, I was occasionally pummeled as a newcomer in one job and second-guessed as the company president in another. Office life can be noisy.<\/p>\n \n\tHence, were I to occupy an office today I think would agree, not with the AI Peter Bart\u2019s \u201cvoice\u201d but with Bartleby, the superbly informed columnist of The Economist. He wrote last week that he \u201cwelcomed the constant background hum of generative AI, even though meetings now routinely end with phrases like \u2018I guess I still have a job.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tStill, the overall AI lexicon troubles him: \u201cPeople have no clue what they are talking about with words like \u2018agentic\u2019 or \u2018non-determinism,\u2019\u201d he writes. Bartleby, to be sure, often works at home as do most newsmen.<\/p>\n \n\tSo what\u2019s the bottom line? Last week the Wall Street Journal reported that, as more companies try to herd workers back to the office, average office attendance \u201chas barely budged.\u201d And managers are reluctant to crack down too intensively.<\/p>\n