Are we simply our patterns?

Are we simply our patterns?

That question used to belong to philosophy. Now it belongs to the workplace.

A fascinating piece from MIT Technology Review and Caiwei Chen documents the viral GitHub project in China called "Colleague Skill".

The project was built as a spoof, it imports chat histories and workplace documents from apps like Lark and DingTalk (Slack / Teams equivalents), then generates “manuals” describing a coworker’s tasks, habits, quirks, and work style so an AI agent can try to imitate them.

It landed on something raw: the fear that what makes you valuable at work may be turned into instructions for someone, OR something, else.

Companies are already asking workers to document workflows. AI tools are already ingesting calls, emails, docs, tickets, transcripts, code, and decisions.

If enough of your work can be captured, can a machine build a useful shadow of you? A version good enough to draft, review, summarize, route, escalate, or sell?

In the early 1800s, the Jacquard loom used punched cards to automate complex weaving patterns. Before that, much of the pattern lived in the skill of the weaver.

The punched cards changed the equation. The pattern could live outside the person. It could be stored, copied, reused, and run by someone else.

The loom did not end weaving. But it changed where value lived.

AI is now doing something similar to knowledge work.

It is making our patterns visible.

But, a person is NOT simply their patterns.

You are NOT just your email tone, meeting habits, code-review style, stress responses, calendar, texts, recurring jokes, search history, sleep cycles, or decision tree under pressure.

Now, a lot of “you” does shows up as this pattern to the outside world.

That shadow may not be you. But it may be useful enough that the distinction gets economically blurry.

And that creates a fork.

One path says: if I am pattern, I can be copied, compressed, optimized, and replaced.

The other path says: if I have patterns, I can understand them, refine them, own them, and use them as instruments.

Your patterns are not your prison. They are your interface with the world.

AI may help us see the structure of our own excellence. And once we can see it, we can improve it, teach it, and scale it.

A brilliant teacher once posed this question to me:

"you know you are a good learner, but do you know why?"

That changed how I thought about learning and more generally everything else.

And, that may be the question of the AI era.

Until next time,

Ram

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Ram Srinivasan

MIT Alum | Author, The Conscious Machine | Global Future of Work and AI Adoption Leader published in Business Insider, Fortune, Harvard Business Review, MIT Executive Viewpoints and more.

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Ram Srinivasan currently serves as an Innovation Strategist and Transformation Leader, authoring groundbreaking works including "The Conscious Machine" and the upcoming "The Exponential Human."

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