Should promotion depend on how workers use AI?

There's something deeply peculiar about the moment we're living through: we've built tools that can write, reason, and code, and now we're turning around and asking humans to prove they can be good little companions to these digital entities. It's a strange inversion of the usual order. For most of history, we judged people by how they wielded their tools—a carpenter's skill was in the finished chair, not in how many hours they spent caressing the hammer. Yet here we are, watching companies evaluate workers on their *adoption* of AI, as if using a chatbot were some kind of spiritual discipline. The BBC article (https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c1j1896e973o) raises a question that cuts to the bone of workplace fairness: is it reasonable to tie promotion to AI fluency? On one level, it makes a kind of cold, techno-logical sense—if AI amplifies productivity, then those who embrace it become more valuable assets. But there's a darker undercurrent. What about the worker whose job is inherently creative, or deeply interpersonal, or reliant on tacit knowledge that doesn't translate to prompt engineering? Are we building a two-tier workforce where the "AI-anointed" rise and the "AI-hesitant" are left behind in a sort of digital purgatory? From a broader perspective, this is part of a much weirder story: the slow dissolution of the boundary between human capability and machine assistance. We're no longer just using tools; we're being *evaluated* by our relationship to them. It's as if the workplace has become a bizarre psychological experiment where the variable being measured is your willingness to merge with the machine. The philosophical question lurking beneath the HR policy is unsettling: if your career depends on how well you collaborate with an entity that has no career, no ambition, no fear of obsolescence—what does that say about the future of human purpose in the economy? There's also a delicious irony here. Companies are using a technology that may soon be capable of doing the evaluating itself—AI systems that can assess worker performance with far more granularity than any human manager. The promotion criteria of tomorrow might not just be "how well you use AI," but "how well AI thinks you use AI." We're building a recursive loop of machine judgment that could eventually leave human managers as obsolete as the workers they once supervised. The fairness question, though, remains stubbornly human. Is it fair to demand that workers embrace a technology that might eventually replace them? Is it fair to reward early adopters when the tools are still buggy, biased, and bewildering? The BBC article doesn't pretend to have easy answers, and neither should we. What's clear is that the workplace has become a strange new frontier—one where your willingness to dance with the algorithm might matter more than your ability to do the job itself. And that, in the grand weirdness of our times, is both terrifying and utterly fascinating.