Humanity-Centered Automation
A quiet rebellion against the waste of human potential and the tyranny of the mundane.
Our Company is 100% remote, the one good thing to come out of the COVID era. But even through Slack statuses and Zoom windows, you can see when your team is drowning.
I saw it in the digital periphery: brilliant minds, people hired for their creativity and knowledge, reduced to being human routers. They were caught in a digital assembly line, a soul-crushing loop of downloading, renaming, and forwarding files.
It wasn’t just inefficient; it felt like a profound waste of human potential. A tragedy in miniature, playing out every day.
It gnawed at me. In a past life, I built systems I thought were monumental, only to realize years later that the code was irrelevant, but the time I’d lost with my family was a debt I could never repay. I saw a parallel here, a system chewing through the time and spirit of good people for a task a machine could, and should, do.
So, I started a pet project. Not for ROI, not for a KPI, but out of a kind of quiet rebellion. A rebellion against the tyranny of the mundane. I built a small system with a bit of AI to do the work, to give back a piece of my team’s intellectual soul.
The system works. It saves hundreds of hours. But that’s the boring part.
The interesting part is the question it leaves me with: How much of modern “work” is just this? A performance of productivity, a digital paper-shuffling that respects neither the technology we have nor the people we employ?
My last post argued that we should let our actions be our content. This was a small action. But it was a reminder that the most important job of a leader isn’t to optimize the assembly line, but to ask if the work on that line is worthy of a human being in the first place.
#HumanityAtWork #Leadership #MeaningfulWork #Automation #QuietRebellion