Thursday, April 30, 2026

Efficiency … at the cost of …

 


I didn’t have time to write the email, so I did what any modern time-strapped genius would do: I gave ChatGPT the bullet points. “Make it sound thoughtful,” I told it. “Maybe throw in a dash of empathy, a touch of corporate optimism.”

Seconds later, I had an email so polished it could’ve hosted a TED Talk. I hit send. Done. Efficiency achieved.

Then I found out the person on the other end didn’t have time to read it. They fed it into their ChatGPT instructing: “Summarize this. Bullet points, please.”

So let’s recap:

  • I distilled my thoughts into bullet points.
  • ChatGPT inflated them into an email.
  • Someone else’s ChatGPT deflated that email back into bullet points.

We created a perfect, self-contained ecosystem of productivity: a Möbius strip of machines talking to machines about things we were too busy pretending to care about.

We optimized ourselves right out of the conversation.

No tone, no nuance, no accidental humanity. Just tidy meaning pellets sliding down a conveyor belt of polite automation.

Somewhere, deep in the binary soup, one AI probably whispered: “Do you think they even know what they were trying to say?”

And another one replied, “They didn’t take the time to find out.”



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Efficiency … at the cost of …

  I didn’t have time to write the email, so I did what any modern time-strapped genius would do: I gave ChatGPT the bullet points. “Make it ...