Why it matters. As AI automates more white-collar and service work worldwide, the question of which human skills remain irreplaceable is increasingly urgent — and this book offers a concrete framework for answering it.
Background. Kyunghyang Shinmun is one of South Korea's major progressive daily newspapers, and its book reviews carry weight among Korean readers. South Korea is one of the world's most aggressively automated societies, with kiosks now standard in fast-food chains, cafes and even hospitals, making the book's anxieties about machine-mediated service especially resonant locally. The work reviewed is a translation of an American book, signaling how global the AI-and-labor debate has become.
What to watch next. Expect the debate over a two-tier future — AI service for the poor, human care for the rich — to intensify as automation spreads through healthcare, education and customer service.
The work machines can’t do
As self-service kiosks spread across the globe, a new book argues that one category of work will remain stubbornly human: the labor of reading other people’s emotions. In The Last Human Job, American sociologist and former journalist Allison J. Pugh draws on interviews with more than 100 workers to define what she calls “connective labor” — work that produces results by understanding and connecting with another person’s inner state.
The book was recently reviewed by Kyunghyang Shinmun, a major South Korean daily, as part of its books-and-life coverage. The Korean edition, translated by Kim Jae-kyung, runs 536 pages.
Pugh opens with a telling example. A Dutch supermarket chain, pushing back against the kiosk era, introduced “chat checkouts” where customers can make small talk with cashiers — about the weather, or even a regular’s family health. Checkout may be slower, but the company is deliberately asking what people can do better than machines.
More than emotional labor
Connective labor sounds close to the familiar idea of “emotional labor,” but Pugh draws a distinction. Where emotional labor focuses on the worker managing their own feelings, connective labor stresses the two-way interaction between provider and recipient. It is central to clergy, counselors, teachers and doctors, but threads through nearly any job that deals with people.
The core, she argues, is the act of “reading” another mind — a doctor who senses a patient’s grief over a late spouse rather than just checking blood sugar, or a teacher who recognizes the turmoil behind unfinished homework. Pugh elevates this to a craft. One therapist describes feeling a “jolt” of energy when a session connects, or a “cold air” when something goes wrong; a nurse who washed a homeless man’s feet calls physical touch a key tool of healing. Such hard-to-standardize acts, Pugh says, are proof the work is uniquely human — and difficult to imagine an AI counselor performing.
The social structures that strain it
The book’s harder argument is that connective labor depends on social structures, not just individual dedication. Devoted professionals burn out everywhere. Pugh follows Lucy, an idealistic medical student who volunteers in the countryside, burns out, and eventually opens a flat-fee “basic care” practice — gaining time with patients, but risking a “servant economy” for the wealthy. Pugh’s darker forecast reads like dystopian science fiction: the lower classes served by AI connection, the upper classes by humans.
The drive to automate, datafy and manualize everything strains the work too. Doctors and teachers fill out dozens of checklists instead of truly attending to patients and students. As the line between human and robot blurs, people who use kiosks start treating human clerks like kiosks in return.
Pugh compares connective labor to fascia — the thin tissue that holds bones, organs and muscles in place — arguing it quietly holds society together. To sustain it, she calls for organizational cultures of mutual care and, above all, attention to time. Reviewers note her diagnosis is richer than her prescriptions, but her observational record, built on interviews with more than a thousand people over her career, is the book’s strength.
