Arthur shoved his phone in my face while I was drinking my coffee this morning. He was watching a video of some guy who is very, very upset that his artificial intelligence chat thing keeps forgetting what he told it yesterday.
Apparently, the robot keeps coming up with ideas that would bankrupt him. So this fellow's big solution is to lock his entire "business DNA" into computer code. He called it a schema. Or something. I don't know. Arthur tried to explain it. From what I gathered, it's just a gigantic list of rules you have to type out so the machine stops acting like a goldfish.
They want you to sit down and write out fifteen "pillars" of how your brain works.
Fifteen.
My head hurts just thinking about the jargon. Who talks like this. "Permanent business infrastructure." "Context roulette." It sounds like they're launching a space shuttle. But I'm pretty sure they're just trying to get a robot to write an email without offering a customer a ninety-percent discount by accident.
I'll give the guy credit for one thing, though. He was complaining about software companies charging thirty dollars a month for nothing. I agree with him there. My cousin Janet signed up for a meal-planning app six months ago that charges her eighteen bucks a month. All it does is tell her cabbage is in season. She still has to chop it.
My father ran a small engine repair shop out of an old brick bay for thirty-eight years. He had a clipboard, two sharp pencils, and an unwritten rule never to extend credit to anyone driving a car cleaner than his own. No computer brackets required.
If I wanted to feed my entire personality into a rigid fifteen-rule checklist just to make sure I don't give away the store, I’d still be married to my first husband.
Originally published on Substack.
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