On the Absurdity of Automating Everything With apologies to Jonathan Swift, who decided we should learn about cannibalism in high school English class.
Abstract
In the tradition of Jonathan Swift, who proposed eating Irish babies to solve poverty, let us offer a few modest solutions for Corporate America's latest obsession: automating everything, whether it needs it or not. Since AI is the future and we must continue to grow at all costs, it is only natural that we utilize a $10 million language model to recap 5-minute meetings and shorter emails and texts.
Fellow biological cogs in the machine, let us venture through our ghost-town cubicles and crowded Zoom rooms, where algorithms steadily replace everything deemed inefficient, redundant, unnecessary, or trivial—and yes, even those tasks we once enjoyed.
Our Past Success
We have been here before; remember when ISO-9000 guaranteed no more bugs? All we needed to do was rigorously follow a formally documented process that includes a formal process for process improvement and we would never fuck things up again.
Rely on AI for every Coding Task
If you've ever used an AI coding partner, you've likely witnessed the glorious absurdity of asking it to perform a global search and replace for a pattern you already know doesn't exist—or wouldn't matter if changed.
But why stop there? Let's automate code formatting and linting for blank files, and use machine learning to refactor code that hasn't changed since the '90s. Surely there's wisdom in feeding your entire codebase to a neural net just to ask: "Hey, do I have an extra semicolon?"
If this seems overkill, remember we're eliminating inefficiency and redundancy. The inefficiency is the time it takes to think. And with AI, you won't have to do that anymore. What a relief.
Customer Service? Let the Machine Apologize
When was the last time a human customer service agent actually solved your problem? These days, bots are programmed to parrot "We understand your frustration" in 1,024 variations of tone and emoji combinations. Never mind that your double-charged credit card remains unresolved—after all, the goal is scalability, not resolution.
Why not aim higher? Let's deploy bots that apologize before problems even occur, and digital sentinels that whisper we're sorry the moment you land on a homepage or pass through an aisle at the big box store. We'll preemptively eliminate regret through the magic of machine learning.
Marketing for Bots, by Bots
We've entered the age where AI writes, sends, reads, and replies to posts without human involvement—a perfect circle. Do they need us? No, they require us to need them.
A modest proposal: let's automate consumer desire itself. Tell humans what they crave at dawn and what they need by noon. After dinner, serve them AI-generated hallucinations to numb them for another day of the same. We must, after all, maximize existential dread alongside efficiency.
Of course, they'll integrate this with automated fulfillment pipelines to further optimize our operations.
Replace Managers with Probabilities
Why stop at using AI to make hiring and firing decisions? They are always watching; they know which bathroom breaks are biological and which are satisfying your Wordle fix. The algorithms know your KPIs better than you do. They’ve seen your coffee breaks (and correlated them to your bathroom breaks), your typing speed, your email turnaround times, and your passive-aggressive emoji usage. They’ve calculated your career trajectory and plotted your downfall.
If we have gotten this far, why not go full circle? The prophet Philip K. Dick has already perfected the minority report algorithm that can fire you before we waste our time with orientation or perhaps before you even apply.
Suppose they can predict your future underperformance. Then why not let them email your resume to prospective life partners and children? Dealing with rejection is just a wasted effort.
This saves time. This saves money. This is progress.
Conclusion: Embrace the Absurd
If it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing with AI. If it’s not worth doing—well, do it anyway, with a transformer model fine-tuned on 17 terabytes of semi-literate blogs. Remember the wisdom of our Prophet Johnathan Swift, who taught us that when society loses its mind, the only sane response is satire. So here’s ours:
Build a 10-billion-parameter model to write haikus about lunch breaks. Use reinforcement learning to determine the best font for your apology email. Install a sentiment model on your dog to see what they think of you.
Because in 2025, absurdity is no longer a bug. It is a feature.