Tag: Automation

A search engine in a trench coat.

I am not a Luddite. I don’t dislike technology – in fact, almost every dollar I have earned since 2003 or so has been made possible by the Internet, and you glorious people who inhabit it.

I have a Google Pixel phone. A Lenovo ThinkPad. Fiber Internet service. I manage several websites. I have a newsletter that goes out by email to three continents.

I am not afraid of technology.

But I absolutely hate Chat GPT and it’s ilk. It’s not intelligent – it’s a search engine in a trenchcoat, but without the attribution. It’s a job thief. It’s a plagiarism machine.

I was in a meeting the other day, and the need for a communication plan for this organization came up. They’ve needed one for quite a while, but they don’t have a communication person, so since nobody was responsible for it, nobody had done it.

“We don’t have to pay anyone for that,” one of their officers said. “ChatGPT can write one for us in 30 seconds.”

Then, to prove his point, a minute later he dropped the results in the meeting chat.

How successful would such a plan be? How much thought went into it, how much concern for the recipients? How much empathy was involved for the audience? How aligned with the mission of this organization could this robot* possibly be?

And how invested can the organization be in the outcome?

And how many people did not earn a living because of the seconds spent creating a “marketing plan” this way? What is the environmental cost of that computation? What harm to the thinking processes of the person entering it into the robot?

And perhaps most critically to the organization- if it is really that easy, why did nobody do that before?

“My wish simply is to live my life as fully as I can. In both our work and our leisure, I think, we should be so employed. And in our time this means that we must save ourselves from the products that we are asked to buy in order, ultimately, to replace ourselves.”

― Wendell Berry, The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays

Love as an ingredient.

Not far from my house is a restaurant. It’s sort of a deli, and they have sandwiches there, as well as pizza and salads.

I first ate there with my parents, when we moved to Jackson. Dad wanted to share it with us – he had to come to Jackson regularly, and it was one of his favorite places to eat.

More than the food, he liked how they ran the business. He told me a story of one of their employees, who had been diagnosed with terminal cancer, and was soon unable to work. But they kept her on the payroll until she died, so her health insurance remained intact. That story endeared them to Dad. The food was almost secondary.

We still go there, some 7 years later. A couple of times a month, we eat supper there, and I probably have lunch meetings there at least that often. It hots lots of places for me; cost, quality, and of course, that story, and how it affected Dad. That Dad loved that place is also a huge consideration.

The staff is always a delight when we go there. They are smiling, and welcoming, and the service is always fast, and they have never once messed up my order.

A few weeks ago, I stopped by around 2PM to get a late lunch, and there was no one at the counter. And on the counter, beside the registers, was a giant self-serve tablet, like they have at McDonalds. You scroll through a menu, add items to your order, and customize each item by adding pickles, or extra mayo.

I hate these things with a passion. They cannot be clean, with everyone touching them all day. They are not fast – they are actually much slower than telling a person. They are not intuitive – it’s like getting a brand new cell phone whose settings you don’t understand. And often the ones at McDonalds do not work.

This one did not either. Ultimately, after messing with it for at least 5 minutes, an employee came to the counter to rescue me.

I get that it probably saves payroll. But it felt off-brand for this company. Out of character. It was jarring, in the same way it would be jarring to go to a steakhouse and be served surf and turf on paper plates.

And what’s worse, it ruined that story I know about them – the one where they prioritize their employees. Because the decision to replace people with a machine is not the act of love for the employees.

I’ve only been back once. The food tastes different to me now. It’s in my head, I know. But once I had believed they loved their employees. And food always tastes better when love is an ingredient.