I Had a Work Call With Nobody

I was lying in bed with my AirPods in, tired and a bit bored, and thought I’d try having a call with an AI.

It took some fiddling to get it working. A bit buggy. Eventually, we were talking.

I spend a ridiculous amount of time with AI already. I hardly ever type. I dictate, then read what comes back.

And read.

And read some more.

A lot of my working day is me reading a grey thread. I ramble into a microphone, get a wall of text, read it, ramble again. There is an enormous amount of intelligence available, and I spend hours looking at its paragraphs.

So it was quite interesting to lie there and have a conversation.

Voice itself wasn’t new. What caught me was being able to talk while it organised and delegated work.

I asked it to get work going on a website. Some packaging. Gather competitors’ lookbooks and images into references for creatives.

I can’t remember every task. Within about ten minutes, I’d set quite a lot in motion, almost without trying.

I wasn’t in some wonderfully clear state either. I was exhausted. But I could explain something, hear it back, add a bit, move to the next thing.

It felt more like a work call.

There are plenty of things people enjoy about working with other people. Camaraderie. Companionship. Feeling you’re on a mission together. Those have their place.

There’s also the fairly basic pleasure of having a conversation during the day. Hearing something. Talking it through. Getting a break from reading.

I think I’d underestimated how much the way I interact with these things affects whether I enjoy using them.

Because I quite like directing work. Thinking about what we could do. Exploring an idea and getting something moving.

I don’t particularly want to spend my life being the technician in front of the computer.

I’m not a coder. I have no desire to become one. I’ve been told I have an engineering brain, which is lovely, but I still don’t want to fucking do it.

On this call, I could feel a little more of the arrangement I actually want. Something like a chief of staff I could talk to, which could take the conversation and organise work around it.

My direction still mattered. I could give it plenty of pointless things to do. Being able to commission more work doesn’t answer whether any of it is worth doing.

But the interaction felt easier.

There was also no other person’s emotional state to think about. I could be tired and ramble, and the thing would carry on being helpful.

I still had questions. How do I manage context? How do I understand what’s happening when several things are moving at once? Should I even be managing all those things myself?

The interface hadn’t suddenly solved everything.

Then there was the usage.

I couldn’t work out what this call and all the work behind it might consume. I was worried I’d burn through my weekly allowance, which I really bloody need.

So I stopped.

That was the funny part. I was lying in bed, having a conversation, finding more things to delegate. I could have kept going for quite a while.

Then I had to hang up because I wasn’t sure how much robot I had left.