I Asked for a Lackey, and Got a Boss
Suddenly, I'm the bottleneck
I was queuing in the rain outside a branch of Greggs (it’s a bakery) the other morning. The queue itself was a minor, miserable British artwork of silent resentment, anyway I watched this woman spend a good forty-five seconds stabbing angrily at the contactless payment machine. She was jabbing her phone at it like she was trying to stun a trout. Beep. Pause. Error. Stab. Stab. Stab. Eventually, the machine just threw its digital hands up, declined her, and she had to pull out her wallet, defeated, looking like she’d just been personally insulted by a laminated menu.
It was a completely routine, minor piece of morning digital failure, but it reminded me of something crucial. Which is exactly what happened when we invited AI into our lives and then acted surprised when it didn’t immediately start scrubbing the kitchen floor.
We were promised the self-cleaning house, the twenty-hour work week, and a new hobby whittling tiny wooden ducks in a post-scarcity colour-saturated utopia. We wanted an army of helpful digital lackeys to deal with the sheer, depressing filth of modern existence. The overflowing rubbish bins, the endless admin, the whole sprawling diarrhoea of unnecessary tasks.
I was there, I saw it, and, naturally, I bought the shiny PR guff myself. I watched as all the clever people around me, the ones who should have known better, started talking about this new technological wave as if it were a magically appearing, uniformed butler.
But what we got wasn’t a butler. We got a ruthless, metrics-obsessed middle manager, a machine that’s determined to squeeze every last, damp drop of productivity out of your miserable existence, and the ultimate crime against the retina.
The core stupidity of the AI reality is this: the machines are built to manoeuvre data at the speed of light, and they don’t get tired, they don’t need a cup of tea, and they certainly don’t have a crippling anxiety about missing the last train home. The algorithm is sitting there, humming away, generating three hundred documents an hour, and suddenly, you’re the bottleneck.
The mechanism is simple, really. AI is designed for relentless output, but the human brain, this fragile, meat-based calculator, is required to be the input and the final validator. We’ve become nothing more than sophisticated, fleshy, fallible conduits for the machine’s grand plans. We are basically trying to sprint alongside a Japanese bullet train while carrying a bag full of rocks.
And the bitter, rotten cherry on the depressing cake is that as the AI does the cognitive heavy lifting, as it generates the so-so reports and writes the almost-but-not-quite perfect code, our own brains, neglected and unchallenged, slowly atrophy.
We’re not evolving into gods of leisure; we’re devolving into cabbages. Flabby, pale, useless great lumps of vegetable matter, incapable of genuine, unprompted thought, just waiting for the digital rain to water us.
You’ll probably ignore this because humans are idiots, but the only way to avoid becoming the AI’s human pet is to be genuinely useful in a way the machine can’t compute.
Before you hand over a task to a clever bit of code, ask yourself these three miserable questions:
Am I asking for a tool, or am I asking for a decision? If you’re asking for a decision, you’re admitting you’re too lazy to think, and you’ll get what you deserve: a world of mediocre, algorithmically-approved answers. Use it to generate three bad ideas you can then fix yourself.
What am I doing with the speed? The machine’s great at speed. Your brain’s great at slow, pointless rumination. If AI saves you an hour, do not spend that hour starting another AI-generated task. Spend it doing something the machine can’t, like calling your mum or staring out of the window.
Am I validating, or am I contributing? If you’re just checking the machine’s homework, you’re just a glorified spellchecker. Your value comes from injecting the mess, the emotional, illogical, human stupidity, that the AI specifically filters out.
My own stupidity, and the stupidity of everyone I know, was in not understanding that we weren’t just hiring a servant; we were hiring a new, relentless boss. And now we’re all stuck standing in the metaphorical rain, repeatedly stabbing our phones at the future, wondering why the damned thing just won’t give us the past back.
Ask The Hum
Question: Our company just mandated we use an AI note-taking tool for all meetings. It misses half of what’s said, confidently transcribes the wrong names, and sends summaries to people who weren’t even invited. HR says we’re “not using it properly.” How do I use a broken tool properly?
Sarah, Leeds
The Hum responds:
Dear Trapped in Transcription Hell,
You don’t. That’s the answer. You can’t use a broken tool properly, in the same way you can’t successfully hammer in a nail using a wet flannel. What you’re experiencing is the corporate equivalent of forcing everyone to wear shoes two sizes too small, then organising mandatory workshops on “correct walking technique.” HR’s insistence that you’re “not using it properly” is simply the sound of someone defending a purchasing decision they can’t admit was rubbish.
Some vendor convinced your leadership that AI note-taking would “increase productivity” and “capture institutional knowledge.” What they’ve actually bought is an expensive dictaphone with delusions of competence that confidently invents reality whilst CC’ing random bystanders into the chaos. A bit like a Government.