HUMAN AS LUXURY

It's the phrase of the moment in retail, hotels and restaurants. It means that, unless you're paying a top-end premium, you won't get to deal with real people:

🗝️ Electronic hotel check ins.

📵 Bots on all the phone lines.

📺 Online training at work (probably via AI host).

🤖 Ordering restaurant food by phone.

💳 Self-service shopping payments -- Uniqlo and plenty of others are already on it.

It comes the same week as an essay by Matt Shumer (US tech entrepreneur best known for founding HyperWrite, an AI writing assistant) went gigantically viral. The post had 69 million views as of Thursday morning. It argues that we need to stop pretending the big changes of AI are in the future. They are now.

His example is that AI can design, code, build, test and fix an app for him, based on him telling it what he wants in plain English.

I find this hard to align with the verbose, American-sounding summary of the article that my paid-for ChatGPT churned out, despite asking for it in my voice. Or with the fury I hear from people dealing with endless AI slop at work (my favourite term of the week being 'AI-balls-text'): full of fancy-sounding verbiage that lurches between nailing points and being completely wrong.

My bigger problem is that human needs don't feature anywhere his in piece. What are these new apps for? What needs do we want AI to meet beyond creating endless ephemeral blurrrrrrgh? It's notable that two senior AI leaders also resigned this week over concerns about the ethics of their work (more another time).

Skyscraper management

A little while ago, I talked to the facilities lead at a fancy London skyscraper.

All his tenants (different floors are let to different corporates) are pressuring him to move to robotic cleaners as soon as possible.

Which he says is fine for vacuum cleaners: floors are fairly predictable. But surprisingly difficult for everything else: windows, loos, kitchens, offices.

You end up with complex equipment, which breaks easily and needs specialist servicing from teams in China or Singapore, under eye-watering service contracts.

Meanwhile the human cleaners aren’t incentivised to take care of the equipment that is built to replace them.

The technology solves one cost problem. But adds two more.

Play that out in homes. If you have a cleaner, maybe they come and chat and share news. The local gardener fell off his ladder, we need to drop in. They might ask you to look over their kid's CV for them (ours has done). Maybe they dog sit for you occasionally and vice-versa. They take home money to their family.

What would replacing them with a robot do?

Flooded council flats

Last week, presenting to some local authorities, I was told that they’re seeing a rise in legal-sounding letters of complaint, that have clearly been written by AI.

Let’s play that one out too. Someone living in a council flat is being flooded from the flat above. They can’t get through to anyone on the phone (surprise).

So they prompt their AI to write a furious letter citing their rights and threatening legal action.

Of course this letter demands a written legal response, which may well escalate the friction between the council and resident. You can easily see how this ends up in a proper fight with lawyers involved (are we reducing or increasing lawyers in this scenario?).

But none of this solves the problem: someone needs to call them and arrange for a real-life plumber to go to and stop the water. Or the underlying issue, which is probably that someone is cold, surrounded by wet stuff and very worried and needs someone to care about that.

Hand embroidered

In our rush to make human a premium, maybe we don’t end up in luxury. We just break the human need to be connected. And with it all the trust, kindness, reciprocity and community it comes with.

I heard a beautiful counterpoint last week from Alex GS who runs search firm Ithaca Partners. She describes their work as hand embroidered. What an image.

Maybe the real competitive advantage in the next decade won’t be who automated fastest and hardest. It will be who stayed most human, at each and every price point.

On which note, the vlog features me on a tour of Raffles Hotel on Whitehall trying out a gold bath (the luxury phrase by the way did not come from them). They have an ex MI5/MI6 underground storage bunker converted into a secret spy bar.

No robots. Not even cameras allowed. See you down there for some old fashioned chat?

Christine