Artificial Intelligence On Pilgrimage

What happens when business takes the shortcut of automation

This week, I published a new episode of the podcast This Human Business. The subject was the concept of pilgrimage in business. The podcast was 32 minutes long.

This morning, I received an email from Lumen 5, a company that promised it could create a “thumb-stopping’ one-minute video summary of the podcast using the power of artificial intelligence. Here’s what it created:

To be fair, I have been accused before of failing to comprehend the brilliance of artificial intelligence. Still, as far as I can make out, the video is garbled nonsense.

I don’t know what rows of young people all dressed in black, standing still with their hands patiently clasped in front of them, have to do with pilgrimage. The text zooms by too fast to read, in snippets cut and pasted from apparently random spots from the podcast transcript, in no apparent order.

It’s obvious that no human reviewed the AI video before it was sent to me. No human would have allowed something like this to proceed. But then, in Lumen 5’s accelerated timeline, there is no time left for human review.

Having a video automatically created by Lumen 5’s AI system certainly is quicker than the alternative of creating a video myself, but the incoherent quality of the result reminds me that speed is not the most important measure of productivity. Speed without coherence is an optimized sprint into babble.

Cramming a half hour of ideas into 60 seconds is like taking a flight from Atlanta to Portland, Maine instead of hiking the Appalachian Trail. The point of a pilgrimage is to through a long struggle, using the emotional energy generated through the weary effort of each step to ferment our insights.

Because a pilgrimage is centered around the discovery of meaning, the suffering it summons elevates us rather than destroying us. Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl wrote that despair equals suffering minus meaning. When we stay focused on the meaning of what happens to us, we can retain our humanity and transcend despair.

By eliminating the time we have to discover the meaning of our journeys, artificial intelligence is following Viktor Frankl’s equation to the letter, but in the wrong direction. Removing meaning, it leaves us only with despair.

The train wreck of Lumen 5’s video is just one manifestation is what the purveyors of AI are trying to do to our travel, to our work, to our lives at home. They’re making everything smaller, quicker, more efficient. In the process, digital automation is converting human work into nonsense.

It’s not just people working in business who are feeling the pain, but their customers as well.

The solution is to bring humanity back into the process.

In this age of technobabble, we have the responsibility to provide and protect the space and time for true pilgrimages of commerce to take place.

Take long cuts, not short cuts.