Your $200 Brain Dinner
Trying to out-microwave the microwave
Let’s talk about food. Not the lovely, nourishing stuff, but the depressing, processed slop we mostly manage to ingest between panicking about the mortgage and scrolling through pictures of other people’s marginally happier lives.
You can, right now, get all the calories you need for about the price of a bus ticket and a grim sense of self-loathing. Nutrition is basically a solved problem, thanks to industrial farming and those sad, vacuum-packed bags of spinach. A microwaved meal can be on your damp, laminate tabletop faster than you can manage to pronounce ‘authenticity’.
By every cold, functional measure, the expensive restaurant should be utterly extinct. Why would anyone pay two hundred quid for a single plate of something artfully arranged when they could get ten times the sheer bulk for a fiver?
Yet, the good ones, the ones with the white tablecloths, the slightly stressed French maître d’s, and the tiny, bewildering portions, are absolutely thriving.
Why? Because they figured out the secret that every brain-dead management consultant is missing: when the functional problem gets solved, the game moves on entirely. Nobody goes to a genuinely great restaurant because they need food. They go because they want the experience of being somewhere that gives a damn about craft. About atmosphere. About the small, irrational, human decisions that don’t show up on a nutrition label but make the difference between a meal and a memory.
Now, look at your job, you poor sod. AI is doing to knowledge work what industrialization did to food.
Your basic output, that strategy memo, the first draft of the marketing copy, the boilerplate code snippet, is about to become utterly commodified. The functional problem of generating adequate text or code is largely solved. You can get a decent deliverable instantly.
And most companies are responding to this new age of instant, adequate output by competing on speed and price. They’re trying to out-microwave the microwave. This is the McDonald’s strategy, and it’s a race to the bottom that ends with you being replaced by a slightly cheaper, infinitely faster digital version of yourself.
The restaurants that survived automation didn’t try to sell reheated slop faster. They leaned into what the microwave can’t do:
Judgment about what matters.
Taste that comes from accumulated, often painful, experience.
The confidence to look at the customer (or the client) and say, “Actually, you don’t want what you think you want.”
Your AI competition isn’t the problem. Your strategy is the problem. You’re competing on outputs that are rapidly becoming free. Meanwhile, the stuff that actually holds value, understanding context, exercising true judgment, knowing which rules to break, intuition, that’s still bottlenecked by humans who’ve put in the miserable, grinding work to develop it.
So, here’s the deeply uncomfortable question worth asking yourself right now: When AI makes your basic deliverable free, what’s your $200 dinner? What is the unique, human-centric, craft-driven experience you’re offering?
The microwave didn’t kill the great restaurants. It just ruthlessly revealed which ones were only ever selling reheated food. And AI is about to do the same to every miserable knowledge worker who only ever generates reheated thoughts.