A.I. Boss

There’s a big hullaballoo going around now about artificial intelligence and how it impacts many corners of our culture. A.I. (as it’s commonly called) has the ability to create art, write college essays and in some cases give “emotional” responses to questions. This concerns some because it removes the human aspect from things like painting a picture or writing a poem. In some cases, it is difficult to determine whether whatever piece art or writing we are looking at was created man or machine. This is how I feel when I interact with my boss.

To be fair he has not been in the position of my boss for that long but so far, the interactions I’ve had with him have me questioning his reality. So far, any face-to-face meetings or even just audio have been few or far between. Most of the time whatever meeting we have set up gets rescheduled or cancelled altogether. When we do have meetings either as a team or 1-on-1 he doesn’t have an agenda or barely talks at all. There are a lot of canned phrases tossed around like, “What’s on your minds?” or “I should look into that.” This makes me wonder if there is an actual human on the other side. Video meetings aren’t much better. Usually when you get the whole team on a video call you see people fidgeting or paying attention to something else on their screen while still listening. But when my boss is on screen there’s not a lot of motion at all except with the occasional eye blink or if he moves to changes the background on his display. The times he does speaking he’s almost always looking down so we can’t see his mouth move while he gives us the same canned responses, we’ve all heard a million times before. I imagine their programming must be breaking down because just recently he’s gotten into the habit of scheduling a meeting and then not showing up. A few minutes after the meeting has started, we’ll get a message like, “I’m running late. Please start the meeting without me.” Which seems like the A.I. equivalent of a “404-Page Not Found” error.

There have been a couple of occasions when I have seen and met my boss in person. But I’m not buying it. I feel like I’m interacting with a Disney animatronic creation programmed to give canned responses and move “realistically” but has all the human warmth of a cinderblock. I guess it could be worse. I could have ended up with a boss who was actually interested (before issues, if any, pop-up) in my work or who was curious about what I was doing. Then I’d never get anything done.