When I originally wrote about the dangers of automation a few years ago, I was concerned about how many everyday interactions we were eliminating in the name of convenience. We could shop for groceries, attend doctor's appointments, apply for jobs, and handle countless other tasks without ever leaving the house or talking to another person.
At the time, I wondered what we might be losing in the process.
That question feels almost quaint now.
Automation has moved well beyond ordering groceries or having a computer scan a resume. Artificial intelligence can write the resume, draft the email that accompanies it, help screen the applicants who submit one, and generate the questions used to interview them. We can use AI to write social media posts, respond to customers, summarize meetings, research topics, make recommendations, and help us decide what to say when we don't know how to say it ourselves.
I use some of these tools, too. That's partly why my concern about automation has changed. I'm less interested in whether we should use it and more interested in whether we recognize when we've started asking it to do something we should probably still be doing ourselves.
Convenience Isn't Always the Problem
There are plenty of things I am happy to automate. I don't miss calling a taxi and wondering whether or when it would arrive. I don't need a human being involved in every transaction simply for the sake of human involvement, and I certainly don't think making something easier automatically makes it worse.
Sometimes convenience is just convenience.
The trouble is that we've become so accustomed to removing friction that we don't always distinguish between the friction that serves no purpose and the kind that is part of being human.
Anyone who has spent 20 minutes arguing with a customer service chatbot knows the difference. The system may be perfectly capable of answering the questions it was designed to answer. That doesn't help much when your situation falls outside those parameters and you cannot reach a person who understands what you're actually asking.
The same is true in less obvious ways. An automated hiring system can help sort through hundreds of applications, but it can also eliminate someone before another person ever considers the context behind what is on the page. AI can help us write something faster, but if we rely on it to do too much of the thinking, we can end up with something technically competent that doesn't sound much like us.
At #Strella, we've always stressed the human element in social media. I used to think about that primarily in terms of communication. The more technology advances, the more I realize it also applies to judgment.
What Are Willing to Hand Over?
That's the part of AI and automation I find most interesting and, at times, unsettling.
There is an obvious difference between asking a tool to schedule something and asking it to evaluate a person. There is also a difference between using AI to clean up something you've written and having it determine what you think in the first place. The lines between those things aren't always as obvious when you're using the technology every day.
I know how easy it is to choose the faster option. If a tool can take something off my plate, my first instinct isn't necessarily to make life harder for myself just to prove I can do it without technology. But I also don't want efficiency to become the only measure I use to decide whether something is worth doing.
Some things probably should take a little effort. Some conversations should be uncomfortable. Sometimes we need to read the whole thing, wrestle with what we think, or talk to someone whose situation doesn't fit neatly into a predetermined set of options.
I'm not sure we improve those experiences by making them disappear.
The Human Element Still Has a Place
I ended the original version of this post by telling people to deal with other people whenever they could. I suggested physically going to the store sometimes, seeing a doctor in person, and having hiring managers look at resumes themselves.
I don't think I'd make those same prescriptions now. There are good reasons someone might need telehealth, grocery delivery, or any number of technologies that make life more accessible. The issue isn't whether we choose the automated option. It's whether we still have a meaningful choice when human involvement would make a difference.
That's what I don't want us to lose.
Technology will continue to get better at doing things that once required people, and I suspect we'll keep finding new ways to use it. Some of those changes will be genuinely useful. Others may solve problems that weren't really problems in the first place.
I don't know exactly where that line is, and I doubt it's in the same place for everyone. But I do think it's worth noticing when convenience starts replacing something we actually valued.
And yes, I still think you should get off your damn phone when someone is sitting right in front of you.
What is something you appreciate being able to automate, and what is something you'd rather keep human?
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