Look Up, You Useless Blight
Before we all dissolve into a puddle of irrelevant, lukewarm thought-goo
Right, here we are again. Another post where I tell you, you gorgeous, floppy-brained reader, why everything’s a shambles and it’s all your fault.
Today’s focus: the Meeting.
Oh, the sheer, crushing tedium of the modern meeting. You’re physically present, aren’t you? Sat there like a sad garden gnome left out in the November drizzle. You’ve hauled your lumpen carcass across town, perhaps endured the clammy, passive-aggressive scrum of the Central Line, just to occupy a seat around a laminated particle-board table.
But look at you. Mentally? You’ve got the full, thousand-yard stare of someone whose boiler just packed in on Christmas Eve. Your actual, organic, wetware brain is utterly AWOL.
Why? Because you’ve got the damn laptop open, haven’t you? One tiny window has the AI-generated précis of the last meeting, which you haven’t actually read, because why bother reading a summary of something you didn’t pay attention to in the first place? Next to that, you’ve got another AI quietly whirring away, transcribing this meeting, summarising the ‘key takeaways’ in real time. It’s like watching an automated car wash where the person in the driver’s seat is fast asleep and drooling onto the dash.
This is what I call an efficiency performance. You’re performing the role of a productive human by outsourcing the entire rotten job to a cluster of silicon. You’re not being more productive; you’re just more absent. You’ve turned your attendance into a sort of bureaucratic phantom limb – it’s there, it wiggles, but it contributes nothing but a faint, low-level existential throbbing.
And the glorious irony is that the AI is now thinking for you, and the only thing you are thinking about is whether you remembered to switch the washing machine on, or perhaps the faint, stomach-churning memory of that particularly sad-looking scotch egg you bought at the station this morning.
Honestly, it’s all so pathetically real. We’ve been handed the keys to the intellectual kingdom, a thinking machine capable of solving most of our dreary admin woes, and what do we do? We use it to justify switching off our own grey matter and daydreaming about minor DIY projects. It’s like being given a Ferrari and using it exclusively to nip down the corner shop for a carton of milk.
So, here’s my caustic, misanthropic plea, before we all dissolve into a puddle of irrelevant, lukewarm thought-goo. Close the damn laptop. Just for five minutes.
Be in one place at one time. A truly revolutionary concept, that. A genuine, terrifying moment of presence. I know it sounds as appealing as catching a mild stomach bug, but you might just find that your own, messy, rubbish brain is capable of thinking things the machine hasn’t considered. Yet.
I’m off now. I need to get the AI to write my tax return. I can barely manage to sign my own name these days, let alone calculate the stamp duty on my own crippling lack of ambition.