My experience of some AI services these days has been hit and miss.
I ask a simple question; it gives me an answer to a question I hadn’t asked. I clarify. It apologises, then repeats the same wrong answer with more confidence. By the fourth message it has, somehow, tried to sell me a subscription, which is sort of almost impressive. Machines failing at being human is expected. It’s even a little funny.
What isn’t funny is watching a human do the same thing on purpose.
I’m ten days into a run of eight flights and sixteen transfers – Ubers, taxis, and whoever shows up. And the thing I keep coming back to isn’t the chatbot. It’s the drivers.
Can someone explain to me why so few drivers get out of the car to help with luggage? I grew up in the country, where a cab driver loaded your bags into the boot and saw you to the end of your trip without being asked. It wasn’t service. It was just how you treated a person. It’s a bleak contrast these days.
Now, I watch elderly travellers lift their own suitcases. People with accessibility needs manage alone. Women in heels wrestle with a boot that won’t stay up. Parents juggle kids, bags and nowhere near enough hands, while the driver waits behind the wheel for everyone to serve themselves. I even watched a driver the other day sit inside his warm, cosy cabin while a customer in the pouring rain loaded three bags into the boot alone. So, when someone does get out to help, it’s a genuine shock. That should tell us something.
The more advanced the system around us becomes, the more human the human inside it has to be. Not less. More. Because everything a machine can do – schedule, despatch, route, calculate a fare, eventually even drive the car – it will keep doing better, more accurately, faster and cheaper than we ever could.
That was never the competition. The competition was always the thirty seconds it takes to lift a bag, open a door and say good morning or good afternoon.
Even Uber’s own CEO isn’t pretending otherwise. In a recent interview, Dara Khosrowshahi said the nine and a half million drivers on Uber’s platform today could become twenty million autonomous vehicles within the next couple of decades, vehicles he expects will prove safer than the humans currently behind the wheel. The company these drivers work for is already planning for a future that doesn’t need them to drive. Which makes the thirty seconds even more valuable, not less. Driving was never going to be the thing that made a driver irreplaceable. What happens in the thirty seconds around the driving was always going to be that thing, and it’s the one part no roadmap has a replacement for.
A chatbot getting confused doesn’t threaten anyone’s job. It’s expected, and it’s forgivable. But a person who has the one thing a machine will never have, manners, generosity, warmth, the simple instinct to notice someone struggling and help, and chooses not to use it? That’s the real risk. Not to their customer. To themselves.
Because if the human in the seat isn’t bringing anything a machine couldn’t already do, then the human in the seat is the one who’s replaceable. Not the other way around.
I am not replaceable. My presence, my judgement, my willingness to notice you and act on it – no algorithm touches that. But if I sit on my hands while you struggle with your bags, I’ve made myself exactly as replaceable as the chatbot that tried to sell me a subscription I never asked for.
Civility was never complicated. It’s just the choice to be the human in the room every time you get the chance.
And you never know who’s climbing into the back of that car. That customer could be someone looking for exactly that kind of human being, the kind whose skills and character will outlast any job description, long after the driving itself has been automated away.