The Sneering Pumpkin

 

The Sneering Pumpkin

Put it in coffee, put it in cake,
put it in candles for goodness’ sake.
Room spray? Shampoo? Dog treats? Why not?
Heavy hand that pumpkin spice in all that you’ve got.

“Limited edition!” the signs claim in the stores,
“Our pumpkin spice make-up can de-clog your pores.”
And while shoppers may grumble, “Really? In everything?”
The pumpkin just sneers: “Yep, makes the register ring.”

Just Give Me the Cup

I ordered a large coffee. Not a cortado with a backstory. Not a single-origin pour-over that required a short lecture. Just … a coffee.

The transaction took maybe eight seconds. The counter person rang it up, turned the screen toward me, and there it was: The little moral checkpoint disguised as a payment screen:

The counter person stood there, waiting. Not impatiently, not aggressively … just existing in that way that made me painfully aware of an invisible social contract I hadn't considered before walking in.

Why should I tip to be handed an empty cup so I could walk over to the coffee station and perform the rest of the service myself: choose between light roast, dark roast, hazelnut, decaf, and then negotiate with a small army of creamers and sweeteners.

What exactly am I tipping for here ... and was I really about to hit “No Tip” in front of another human being?

I’ve always viewed tipping as a considered act. You sat down, someone took care of you, and at the end, you left something that reflected how that went. Great service? Leave more. Indifferent service? Leave the standard. Genuinely terrible service? Leave less, feel slightly bad about it, and argue with your dining companion about it on the drive home. The whole point was that the tip was earned. It was a grade. A signal. A small piece of feedback written in dollars.

Now it's like a tax. A tax with guilt built in, collected before any service has been rendered, at a counter, in public, with someone watching.

It's not only about the money. Fifteen percent more on a $5 coffee isn’t gonna ruin me. It’s the broken logic underneath it. Tipping, in its original form, was about incentive. Do a good job, get rewarded. That feedback loop made sense. It kept everyone honest. It gave servers a reason to be present, attentive, warm … because their income depended, in part, on the quality of their effort.

Pre-tipping destroys that entirely. You're asking me to evaluate a performance before the curtain goes up. You're asking me to pay for value that hasn't been created yet. And once I've paid, there's no mechanism left … no lever, no signal, no way to say "actually, that was excellent" versus "actually, you ignored me for twenty minutes while the coffee got cold." It's all collapsed into a single anxious moment at the register before anything has happened at all.

The moment of payment has turned into a tiny social negotiation. You’re not just buying coffee, you’re performing generosity under observation. It’s like being asked to applaud before the show starts.

“Give me 25% now… and we’ll see how it goes.”

This doesn't work in my old-fashioned brain. Incentives matter. Timing matters. Value matters. These aren’t abstract ideas, it’s how work functions: You offer something of value. Someone else recognizes it. There’s an exchange. That’s the deal. Handing me a cup is not the same as taking care of me. One is a transaction. The other is an experience.

Blurring that line turns exceptional effort into just another checkbox. And ironically, it removes the very thing tipping was supposed to encourage: the incentive to do something well.

So yes, I stood there for a second too long. I felt the weight of a decision that shouldn’t have been that heavy. And then I pressed “No Tip.”

I don't feel great about the look I got. I don't feel terrible about the decision. I feel mostly tired. Tired of the machine pivoting toward me like a moral test.

I took my cup, walked over to the coffee station, and poured it.

The coffee was fine.

____________________

The payment screen swivel is one of the stranger social innovations of our time. The way it turns toward you like an accusation. The way a number above 15% (I’ve seen 30%) is always pre-selected, glowing, suggesting. Like the screen itself is disappointed in you for even hesitating. Tapping "No Tip" feels less like a financial decision and more like publicly announcing you kick dogs.

I don't kick dogs. I just want a coffee.

Where's the Safety Inspector?

Nobody has to prove that a toaster is safe before they’re allowed to sell it. Well, actually, somebody does.

There are rules for toasters. Rules for elevators. Rules for bridges. Rules for electrical wiring. Even playground equipment has standards, because we’ve collectively agreed that children shouldn’t be launched into the shrubbery because someone skipped a safety inspection.

This is how civilization works. If you build something powerful enough to hurt people, there are laws, standards, inspectors, liability, and, when all else fails, the possibility that someone in authority can tell you to stop.

But not for AI.

The biggest AI companies are building increasingly powerful autonomous systems while, by their own employees’ and leaders’ accounts, acknowledging that they don’t fully know how to control them. Some are openly discussing serious risks of serious harm using phrases like "catastrophic" or "existential risks to humanity".

That should make us pause.

If an elevator company said, “We’ve built a new elevator that can make its own decisions, we’re not entirely sure what it’ll do, and there’s a decent chance someone could get hurt,” I suspect the regulatory response would be fairly brisk.

Nobody would say, “Interesting. Maybe let’s put 40 people in one and see how the experiment goes.”

But with AI, it’s build the thing, release the thing, watch millions of people interact with the thing, and hope everything turn out OK.

I’m not arguing against AI. I’m just suggesting we need oversight and regulation.

If a company is building systems powerful enough to act autonomously and potentially cause serious harm, it should have to demonstrate that those systems are safe enough to deploy. Test them. Stress them. Find the failure modes. Fix what breaks. Bring in people who don’t work for the company to kick the tires.

And if the answer is, “We can’t reliably control this yet,” then perhaps the product isn’t ready for prime time.

AI can make you prolific

 

With AI, your company can produce an unlimited supply of content.

Twelve blog posts before breakfast, 47 social posts by lunch, and, for your website, an AI-generated image of a middle-aged guy in a tie pointing at a graph while a small purposefully diverse group nods approvingly.

The machines will keep producing and we’ll keep publishing. But people will still have the same old brains … we’ll scroll past most of it.

In terms of content consumption, humans have never been particularly attracted by volume. We notice what feels familiar, useful, surprising, or unmistakably “someone”.

Yes, AI is making the act of producing something remarkably easy. But it hasn’t made the act of being remembered any easier.

In fact, it may have made it harder. When everyone can produce polished writing, beautiful images, clever campaigns, and reasonably convincing thought leadership, “good” starts becoming the wallpaper of the internet.

Competence stops being distinctive when everyone is competent.

So it’s time to stop asking “How much content can we make?” and ask “Could someone recognize our content if appeared without our logo?"

Maybe it’s a phrase. A visual style. A peculiar way of looking at the world. An observation about customers that sounds so obvious afterward you wonder why nobody said it before. Something with fingerprints.

Yes, AI can make you prolific … but prolific is not the same as memorable.

And I’d rather be the thing someone remembers tomorrow than the thing an algorithm produced a couple of dozen times while you were sipping your morning coffee.