Homo Prompticus and The Death of Professional Ethics

*A Professor’s Take on GenZ, AI, and the Art and Science of Building a Real Team*

It was a Sunday morning, and I was seated, as usual, in my favourite corner of the Irani café, sipping a weak English breakfast tea and my even weaker optimism about the next generation of professionals. We will call them GenZ. That’s when the Professor walked in.

“Good morning, Professor,” I greeted him

“Good?!” he exclaimed, sitting on the chair opposite me. “You call this good? We are witnessing the slow death of professional sanity, my friend.”

“Another apocalypse?” I teased. “Did someone invent a new job title like ‘Global Visionary Strategist’ after attending a 2 hour webinar of some kind?” Well, this is not unusual now a days. Don’t feel bad.

He waved off my sarcasm. “No, no, this is bigger. It’s the Great CV Mutation.”

I raised an eyebrow. That was enough for Professor to vent out. He lighted his cigar. I pushed the ashtray.

“You see,” he began,  “once upon a time — not so long ago — people joined organizations to work, to learn, to contribute. To actually… grow. Grow with the company”

I nodded. I remembered those days — full reports to write, multiple shots of coffee to fetch, work as a xerox boy when in emergency and experience the joy of finally being trusted with a real client meeting. Wow, I remembered my seniors who guided me in my young days and those who inspired me.

“But now,” the Professor sighed, “most, and I dare say all GenZ join companies for one reason — to decorate their CVs to jump higher”

He wasn’t wrong. Just last week, a fresh MBA in sustainability at my office, after spending three weeks for changing fonts and aligning logos on PowerPoint slides, proudly announced on LinkedIn that he had ‘worked on developing strategic presentations for the World Bank on Environmental and Social Framework.’ There are several such examples.

I groaned. We both knew the type —MBAs and master’s holders of some kind, armed with two years of solid ‘LLM experience’ not Legal degrees, but Large Language Models, claiming as wizards in sustainability.

Polished outputs, articulate, and often… completely disconnected from real, gritty work.

Fortunately or unfortunately, this “band” of GenZ professionals do not stay long in the organizations.

Professor continued his story, saying, “They’ll sit through strategic discussions, nod wisely, throw around words like ‘synergy’ and ‘impact’… and the next morning?”

The Professor paused for dramatic effect.

“They hit “send” on a resignation email that was beautifully crafted in advance with ChatGPT. Letter full of gratitude but with absolutely no soul in the words they chose”

I chuckled, though it wasn’t really funny. It is happening all around us.

“And what about the interns?” I asked.

“Ah, them I like,” the Professor smiled. “At least they’re honest. They come to learn, they fumble, they ask questions. You know they’ll leave in three months — but if you’re smart, you squeeze every ounce of curiosity out of them while they’re around and give them your best.”

I laughed. That much was true. Interns were like mangoes in summer — sweet, seasonal, and gone before you knew it. And like dark red strawberries where the season typically runs from December to March.

In my company, our environmental internship program is open throughout the year and we have been fortunate to get the best harvest of the season. But then you and your senior team members must be like flowers of fragrance – fragrance of your integrity and professional accomplishment – so the interns will come and circle like butterflies travelling a distance.

“Anyways Professor, so what do we do?” I asked.

The Professor leaned in, lowering his voice like he was sharing the secret to eternal wisdom.

“We forget that fragile and expensive middle,” he declared. “We build teams with two ingredients: at least ten old-school seniors with at least 15 years of experience and half a dozen hungry young interns – flushing in and out.” He defined fragile expensive middle as masters and PhDs either fresh from colleges or with 3 to 4 years of experience and thoroughly confused what to do in life.

I nodded. The seniors — the ones who had survived pre-LLM times — people who’d built reports from scratch, argued with clients face-to-face, and didn’t outsource their thinking to AI, will know how to get best from the bright interns. That is how a boutique knowledge based company should operate. And when you want scale up, the company should work in partnership and curate a network of Associates surrounding your business canvas.

“So no inflated CVs, no ghostwritten resignations,” the Professor concluded. “Just hard-earned experience at the top, raw curiosity at the bottom — and nothing in between to dilute the mix.”

I smiled. It was a crazy suggestion, but it made sense. Maybe, just maybe, that’s how we’d survive the rise of “Homo Prompticus”.

And who is Homo Prompticus?

Homo Prompticus — /ˈhoʊ.moʊ prɒmpˈtɪ.kəs/ — is the newest evolutionary offshoot of Homo sapiens, believed to have emerged sometime around the release of ChatGPT-3.5.

Unlike their ancestors, Homo Prompticus does not rely on tedious processes like thinking, researching, or constructing logical arguments. Instead, their cognitive development is concentrated entirely in their thumbs — evolved specifically for rapid typing and whispering sweet prompts to Large Language Models (LLMs).

Their  natural habitats are the Co-working spaces, LinkedIn feeds and coffee shops where there is free high speed internet.

But be warned…
For all their clever prompts, there’s one thing Homo Prompticus cannot outsource —
the Originality.

And here’s the part they often miss as originality was never intended in LLMs. It was intended in you.

As for words on professional ethics?
Let’s just say — like  a handwritten good-bye note —
They’re now on the endangered species list.

 

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