Those Who Will Choose Not to Use It

Imagine a restaurant ten years from now. By the entrance, beside the menu, a small plaque reads: ‘Staffed entirely by people.’ The waiter gets an order wrong. The cook changes the dish of the day because she found something better at the market that morning. Someone comes to your table, asks how the meal was, and waits for the answer. It is one of the most expensive restaurants in the neighborhood. There is a waiting list.

I keep returning to that scene. I am interested in what we would be buying by sitting down there. The food, of course. Also the time of someone who has chosen to look after us for a while. Something so ordinary that we can overlook it today, yet under certain circumstances it could become exceptional.

As artificial intelligence takes on more tasks, some things done by people may acquire a different value. The possibility both excites and unsettles me.

I think of candles. We still light them even though we have electricity. I think of someone choosing a vinyl record, taking it out of its sleeve, and sitting through an entire side when they could find a song in seconds. Or someone kneading bread and waiting several hours before putting it in the oven. Those choices involve a relationship with time. The waiting is part of what they are looking for.

That does not mean everything handmade will become a luxury. But it helps me imagine a future in which the ease of obtaining a result makes us pay closer attention to how it was produced, who was there, and what they chose to put into it.

With artificial intelligence, that question reaches places far more intimate than a kitchen or a record collection. We can delegate a message, an explanation, the search for an idea, part of a decision. Finding suitable words for an occasion takes less and less effort. I wonder what will happen to the value we place on the effort of finding them.

An awkward letter can move me because I know the person who wrote it. I know how hard it is for them to say certain things. I can recognize them in a repetition, in a sentence they left unfinished. If someone else gives me the same text, the very same words may mean considerably less. Part of what we receive depends on who took the trouble to be there.

I am not defending mistakes for their own sake. When a tool helps prevent a serious error, I want that help to exist. Nor do I believe using artificial intelligence automatically erases the intention of the person using it. The question that interests me comes a little later: how much of our own participation are we willing to preserve when it is no longer essential to getting a good result?

Labels could appear, along with promises and new ways of charging for that difference. A hotel offering a conversation with someone who knows the neighborhood. A service guaranteeing that one person will stay responsible for helping you until the problem is solved. A school emphasizing the time its teachers can devote to each student. Human presence turned into a special feature.

That is where the image of the restaurant begins to lose its charm.

Because if listening, teaching, or keeping someone company becomes too expensive, the chance to spend time with another person could depend increasingly on what we can afford. I imagine accessible automated services and, behind another door, people with time for those who can pay for it. It is a risk I find hard to contemplate calmly.

Technology can also bring help to people who have none today. It can ease workloads and leave more time to care for others. That future seems desirable to me. Precisely for that reason, I think it is worth discussing what we do with the time it frees up. We can devote it to being more present or use it to reduce contact even further. Our own decisions lie within that difference.

Then there are those who will choose not to use it. Perhaps for one activity, within one relationship, for a few hours. People who understand the tool and decide to keep part of the work for themselves. A writer who wants to work through a difficult page alone. Someone cooking for friends even though ordering food would be easier. A family leaving phones away from the table and accepting that the conversation will have silences.

That freedom interests me. Being able to use something should also include the possibility of setting it aside, without having to explain every refusal. There are things we do to reach a result and things that shape us as we do them. Sometimes they are the same activity.

Writing, for example, can help us discover what we think. If I receive a neatly organized answer too soon, I might save an hour. I might also miss the idea that would have appeared after writing three bad paragraphs. That loss is difficult to measure, precisely because I would never get to know what I had missed.

Something similar happens with projects. The difficulty of beginning, making mistakes, and revisiting our work forces us to develop judgment. I would like a tool’s help to deepen that learning. For that to happen, I need to keep asking questions and taking responsibility for decisions, even when accepting the first available solution would be convenient.

I do not imagine a life without artificial intelligence. I use it, I am interested in it, and I write about what it is changing in us. That is where I am asking this question from. I want to be able to recognize when it is helping me participate more fully in my life and when I am beginning to withdraw from it for the sake of convenience.

Perhaps the most valuable gesture is to choose, with some care, what we want to keep doing. A difficult conversation. A few pages. A meal. Listening to someone without immediately preparing an answer. Activities that ask for our time and, for that very reason, say something about whom or what we give it to.

I return to the restaurant with the plaque. I hope that ten years from now we can enjoy all the kinds of help we can barely imagine today. I would also like sitting across from a person willing to listen to us to remain an experience within everyone’s reach.

Meanwhile, the question stays close to home. Of everything I will be able to delegate, what do I want to keep doing myself? Whom do I want to give my time to, even when there is a quicker way to get things done?

Perhaps the luxury of the future will contain something of this: someone who could be elsewhere choosing to stay and pay attention. I would like us to learn its value without first having to make ourselves scarce.

Christian Ruggeri