Big tech claims that Artificial Intelligence will “remove the drudgery” from our daily work. But did you know they’ve been making this promise for 80 years?

In 1957, Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy starred in Desk Set, a Hollywood romantic comedy that accidentally became one of the most prescient films ever made about office automation. 70 years before ChatGPT, this movie perfectly predicted our modern anxieties about AI - from corporate spin and system meltdowns, to the bizarre reality of “AI hallucinations.”

In this video, we explore how Desk Set exposed the “Productivity Paradox” decades before economists gave it a name. We also look at the true nature of today’s AI job crisis: why highly skilled workers aren’t just losing their jobs, but are being pushed into the exhausting, monotonous world of “data annotation” to train their electronic replacements.

If you think the fear of machines taking our jobs is a modern problem, it’s time to meet the EMERAC.