AI can compress work. It cannot compress the bushel of salt it takes for people to trust each other.
That is The Impatience of Jobs: trying to get the relational yield of shared time after work has stopped producing it. Historically, people built trust by doing real things side by side. In a one-man-job world, that surface area shrinks quickly.
The predictable response is ritual on demand: offsites, forced candor, mission language, intensity. But the warning in the book is older and harder: “If a man is not humane (Ren), what has he to do with ritual (Li)?” Form without Ren is cargo cult. Motion without motor.
That matters now because AI and distributed work make isolation efficient. If work no longer generates Ren, you have to build it deliberately—but you cannot fake the time element. Try to shortcut it, and you won’t get coherence. You’ll get theater.