Machina ex machina

Last week, I sat in a room in San Francisco with 40 of my colleagues for four days, listening to business school professors and start-up founders talk about Disruption and Transformation.  One presenter talked about how all of the innovation – as measured in companies with a market cap of $1 billion or more – is coming out of the US and China, and that Europe has been left way behind, presumably because the Europeans worry too much about the welfare of their citizens and not enough about their start-ups.  We visited a start-up incubator where young ambitious CS majors pitched us on their ideas to solve the problem of the “data abyss.”   We talked about how Wal-Mart – the largest private employer on the planet – is investing heavily in automation and AI, and that many of the 1.5 million people who work for Wal-Mart could be out of a job soon.*   

Outside, homeless people drifted around Market Street like zombies.  A leathery-skinned black man approached me on Monday as I was walking up to Chinatown and laughed as he punched himself in the jaw repeatedly.  Thursday I saw another man with a scraggly beard, prone on the sidewalk in front of the Nordstoms and flailing violently every few seconds, while a policeman and an EMT stood by, not quite sure how to approach him.  My colleagues reported encounters with people copulating on street corners and defecating in alleyways.

The weekend before, I took my daughters to Panera for dinner one night (highly recommend the blood orange lemonade, BTW).  Panera has always pretty operationally efficient as far as I could tell: the workflows are well organized and they give you the flashing tile thing that buzzes when your order is up so you can find a place to sit down in the meantime.  Now they’ve taken things up a notch and installed touch-screen ordering monitors, which are placed in offensive-line formation in front of the regular counter, which is at this point still manned by a human being.  Evidently, this is part of “Panera 2.0,” and the business press has unsurprisingly talked about this as a cost-saving measure and that people will lose jobs, all of which is true.  Perhaps more frightening is that most people would prefer interacting with yet another screen to having even fleeting, transactional contact with another human being.  But this shouldn’t surprise anyone at this point.

On the flight home, I read an article in the Guardian about how the Church of England has taught Amazon’s Alexa to recite the Lord’s Prayer.

* Not that Wal-Mart employees have it so great, but still.