At Something Approaching Quantum Speed
There are no fewer than 716 or 731 miles door-to-door from St. Louis, MO, to the drive between the Big and Little cabins on Big Sand Lake, depending on whose house you’re starting from and which one you’re returning to. It can certainly take more time if one happens to take a wrong turn or an intentional side adventure.
No matter which way you cut it, it’s virtually impossible to make the trip in fewer than 10 ½ hours by car. And that, for even my most heavy-footed of friends, would be making the trip at something approaching quantum speed – which isn’t even a thing. It’s like the night my Match.com date offered to parallel park for me because he’s a pilot.
One skill doesn’t translate to the other. Sometimes people use technical words like algorithms, ontologies, sentiment analysis, hyper personalization, hyper automation, agentic AI, quantum computing, and parallel parking (yes, it’s a technical concept and one I cannot master) to instill confidence, and other times because they don’t have the words to translate it.
My point is really this: certain things in life simply can’t be done in less time than it takes to get from point A to point B. And more to the point, they probably shouldn’t.
This long and quiet ride between where I live and where I reconnect is, as always, full of thoughts. This year I found myself contemplating our human desire to make things happen faster. Especially the things we don’t necessarily love to do, and how certain things just cannot be automated, at least not with the same results.
As human beings, we seem to have a fascination, perhaps bordering on an obsession, with automating things and making them faster, and we live in an age where more is confused with better.
This isn’t a new phenomenon; one could even argue that it’s been a growing fascination since the invention of the water clock, built in Egypt roughly 3,500 years ago to measure time because sundials only worked during daylight hours.
More media choices, more products, more app features, more doo-dads, doohickeys, and whatchamacallits come out daily, and most of the time I find myself thinking, wait, do I need that? Why do I need that? I didn’t ask for that, and most often I haven’t even mastered the last “improvement” one of the many app marketers thrust on me while “squashing a few bugs and making things better.”
Don’t even get me started on the competing apps on a single device, the sheer volume of updates, and the absolute lack of true user input (at least from where I sit).
For a large portion of my adult life, I was a full-time professional, a mother of three kids who were all active in extracurricular activities, and a parent who believes in the value of a family sitting down for the evening meal (or any meal) together – and device-free. I have never been a person who loves to cook.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a bad cook, and I genuinely love preparing a meal for people I love and building community. But you will never find me reading Bon Appétit for fun. 😊
My answer to how to feed my kids healthy meals while catching up with each other over dinner evolved from “crap, what am I going to make for dinner tonight” (every night) to a multi-meal cooking marathon. When I started the process, it took pretty close to a full weekend to complete, but thanks to spreadsheets and extraordinary skillz, I refined the process so that it all in, from grocery shopping to stocking the freezer, took just over eight hours.
But there are parts of that process that can’t be automated or shortened. It takes a defined amount of time to prep and cook the meal. The defined time varies based on the cook’s experience level, familiarity with the recipe, altitude, preference for crispy vs. doughy, and so on.
Sometimes I fear that in trying to automate things and make them easier, we forget to ask the right questions. Why are we automating this? Are we automating something that even needs to exist? What is the purpose of the ‘thing’ we’re trying to automate? What would happen if we tried it this way? What’s your point of view?
It makes me think back to the printing plant in Livonia, Michigan, the one that used a 9-part carbon form; I’m not exaggerating – that woman had some STRONG fingers.
But why? Why was she using a 9-part form only to use the ninth and least legible version to provide the front office staff with the information they needed to copy the order specs onto an index card? And no, I am not making that up. If there was ever a process that needed to be automated, that was most definitely one of them.
However, the key to improving the office’s efficiency wasn’t going to be found in automating a ridiculous ‘autopilot, we’ve always done it this way’ method of communicating a customer’s requirements from one department to the next.
It required asking a lot of questions, the tough ones to answer – especially if you’re only doing ‘the thing’ because someone else told you to.
In fact, today, I still think we almost certainly aren’t asking the questions that help us understand why/how something isn’t happening quite the way we think it should.
When marketers and technologists talk about how AI can help you work faster, they’re most certainly right. And they’re also most certainly wrong. It’s my personal and professional view that AI is being marketed in a contradictory way.
1. Help me automate routine tasks and work faster.
2. Let me be your thinking partner.
They’re not mutually exclusive, but they’re not the same thing; for example, by default, it simply cannot take less time than the number of hours required to travel from Minnesota to Missouri. Sure, maybe someday we can program in a route and have the vehicle “automatically” transport us along the way.
But there will always, without exception, be at least one, and probably multiple, variables along the way that require a human-led decision and the critical thinking needed to decide which roadside gas station has the best snacks.
We should pause. We need to remember the past, connect it to the future, and build on ideas together.
And for the record, it is actually physically impossible to fly through the sleepy waterfront communities and resorts without taking a proper pause to admire the cottages, wonder about what could really be a treasure in the shop with a small-town version of a wooden Wheel of Fortune spelling “Treasure City” in rustic orange letters.
Technology is part of life, but let’s start doing it the human way before we worry about how to do things the quantum way.