It Isn’t Malice. It’s Distance.

A week at an AI summer school, a grant writer I’ve never met, and a bucket in the park.

The board

In August I spent a week at an AI summer school at the World Economic Forum’s office in San Francisco.

I asked the same question in every room: who does this leave behind?

I asked a founder whether his tool watches the workers. I asked a senior tech leader how she sleeps at night. I have held a very small version of her job.

One afternoon I drew my takeaway on a whiteboard. Tech and the CEO at the top. PEOPLE at the bottom, circled. Between them, a chain of X’s: everyone the decision passes through. And one word with a question mark: MALICE?

By the end of the week my answer was no. Nobody I met said anything that sounded like malice. What I saw was distance: they were far from the lives their work lands on.

The arborist

I asked another speaker: who does this replace? She said it makes the arborist’s job easier.

The founder said his tool doesn’t point at people. It points at trends.

At the time I didn’t believe either answer. Now I think they were answering from far away. From where they stood, the arborist was a job description and the workers were a trend line.

That was my board. Nobody in the chain needs malice. Each one passes the decision down, and the cost never travels back up.

Malice would almost be easier. You can fire a person with bad intent. You can’t fire distance.

The grant writer

This week I found myself at the top of my own board.

I was building a proposal for a prospective client. One piece was a bank of approved answers, so their grant writer would never start from a blank page.

When I pictured her pushing back, I read it as ego. Wouldn’t everyone want the work done faster?

Then I thought of the arborist. It’s easy to see what another person’s work is doing to people. It’s harder to see what yours could do.

When the person whose job you think you’re making easier pushes back, it isn’t ego. That one is hard to admit.

I have never met her. I don’t know her rate, her hours, or how much of her rent this contract covers. From where I stood, she was a line in a budget.

It’s hard to erase a person’s job, role, money and rent once you’ve met them.

Just picturing her rent changed the proposal. Now it starts with her: what the work really is, which parts need her judgment, and what happens to the hours it frees. I’d ask for those hours to stay paid, to learn the tool or to write more grants. If the point is to cut them, I’m the wrong person to build it.

And none of it starts unless she wants it.

It’s the rule from my kitchen series. Get the machine ready, and train the line cook.

The roof

At the summer school I was looking at the distance between tech and workers. This week I found it on an ordinary afternoon.

Men were working on a roof in the heat. Hard work, a risk to their lives, and work I don’t have to do.

I get to write, and figure out how to get paid for it.

Ease has a supply chain. That afternoon, I was on the easy end of it.

The bucket

The same afternoon, in the park, I saw dead gophers in a bucket. Gophers and gophers and gophers.

I thought: what if you could see everyone your work has replaced, or made life harder for?

Someone who couldn’t pay for their kids’ school. Someone who couldn’t pay for their surgery.

If you looked at the pile underneath, all in a bucket, you’d die. It sits under your privileges: the jobs you’ve taken over, and the jobs you never have to do because of your education.

Distance keeps the bucket out of sight.

Not every bucket is full. Some change leaves people better off.

What I can do is look in mine before I build. Meet the person before anything gets made. Put their hours in the budget. And then retrain the arborist, the grant writer, the worker.

The grant writer is first on my list to talk to. Then an arborist.

You don’t need malice to cause harm. But once you know the consequences, distance stops being an excuse.

You can fire someone for malice. Distance, you have to cross yourself.