On Houses, Work, and Staying Human

What Makes a House a Home—And a Person More Than Data

This week, we dropped anchor in DC. We settled on our future new home.

It's small and surrounded by trees, like a tree house in California. It has large windows and a yard that backs into a park. I can already imagine how we will fill it with ourselves, family, and friends.

To make it a home, we'll first have to move in. It will be a while yet.

Until then, it’s just a data point — one unit in the vast dataset of houses defined by location, footage, number of rooms, date built, and price.

That got me thinking: if a house is data in a market, what about us in the workplace and job market? Aren't we also distilled into a row in a spreadsheet, where the columns are attributes, such as age, price (our salary bands), production metrics, and performance scores?

The Datafication of Houses—and Ourselves

Raw data is a collection of facts, numbers, or observations. It reveals patterns but strips away the nuance and context that give meaning to our experiences and tell the story of who we are.

The parallels between the housing market and the current employment landscape are strikingly clear. Just as markets assign a value to a home based on available information, in the job market, we're distilled into years of experience, education credentials, previous titles, and salary requirements.

Our uniqueness gets flat-out flattened.

Consider what happens when you use ChatGPT to create a résumé or cover letter. It takes your input, works its magic, and produces a polished version of "you" perfectly aligned to the job description you've fed it. I did it recently. The AI made me look unnaturally competent: what it wrote could have been written about any perfect candidate.

Like in a contra dance where partners work together, the algorithmic mirroring of job descriptions and résumés diminishes the humanness of each applicant.

In a real-estate description of a house, the lost intangibles are details you see during a walk-through: how light moves through space, children's voices at a nearby park, or the worn spots on a hardwood floor.

For humans, the lost intangibles are courage to try new things, curiosity, how you work with colleagues, experience gained from projects that did not go well, and so much more.

AI Will Make Differentiation More Challenging

Data holds meaning to whoever reads it, and to what end. As part of a dataset, a worker can be seen in one of two ways:

1. A cost center – in which case they are data to be minimized.

2. A creator of value – in which case they are data to be invested in.

For a long time, what made us valuable at work was what we knew: expertise, experience, and the ability to solve problems others couldn’t. We built careers on being the person others turned to for answers.

Now, AI is changing everything.

It can take over knowledge tasks and complete them faster than we can log into the system. It researches, reports, drafts, analyzes, codes, and creates everything from images to videos, often in seconds. And this is just the beginning.

AI will also accelerate the datification of work because it will be AI, and not humans, looking at the data points. Depending on "to what end” AI is doing that, it won't give our intangibles a second thought.

[K]Now You: Resisting Datification

After we move in and start making it our own, the house we settled on will become our home. Unless you come and visit someday, you—or the AI and algorithms that flatten us—will not know its fullness.

In Open Socrates: The Case of a Philosophical Life, University of Chicago professor Agnes Callard, writes the following:

Each of us envisions ourselves as a kind of house, and inside that house is a special being–we call it a "mind," and it has the power to figure out answers to questions.

Just like a real life of feelings and special moments will make our house a home, what makes us human cannot be flattened to data points.

Each of us is a 'house' for a mind that questions, wonders, and dreams. Our value isn’t just what we produce; it is in that deep, internal space AI will never touch. If we focus on what makes us different—not what makes us the same—on our relationships, stories, and ways of moving through the world, we reclaim what it means to be 'special.' Special, in its simplest form, means different from the rest.

And that, friends, is how we keep our minds, which are the homes within ourselves, from becoming just another data point in the algorithm.