In his 1973 poem “Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front,” farmer-philosopher-poet Wendell Berry suggested, “every day do something / that won’t compute”.
In 1973, “doesn’t compute” meant, can’t be reduced to math or a decision tree. Do things that make sense from a human perspective but can’t be reduced to calculations.
This line came to mind recently as we’ve had a lot of conversations with clients and friends about AI and its impact on work.
AI expands the range of what “computes.” But Berry’s call rings more true than ever.
As more and more things compute, as AI simulates human reasoning and writing better and better, we need to focus on the things that don’t compute—care, love, curiosity, wonder.
A few years back, I (Richard) did a conference session on customer empathy—how do we understand our customers and their needs in the customer’s own terms, not in terms of our solutions?
The organizers scheduled my session in the last time slot. I was a little dismayed when I saw the final program and noticed that my session was the third or fourth of the day on the topic. “People were going to be tired of hearing about this by 4pm, and my session is going to be empty,” I worried.
Nonetheless, I had a full room and shared the content as well as I could.
Afterwards, a participant came up and said, “This is the third session I’ve been to about jobs-to-be-done and customer empathy today.”
“Oh, no,” I thought, “here goes someone complaining about the repetitive content, just like I feared.”
But he went on, “This is the first time I’ve heard it from somebody who actually seems to care about people.”
What?!? How is it possible to talk about customer empathy and not communicate care for people?
I think it’s easy to get excited about our tools (like customer profiles and jobs-to-be-done). It’s easy to get fired up about how great our solution is.
It’s hard to slow down and bring curiosity and care to our customer research. There are documents and backlogs to produce. Our calendars are full of meetings.
But that curiosity and care are the things that don’t compute. They’re our competitive advantage as humans. They’re the secret to products people love.
If you’re going to use AI in your work, use it to accelerate or replace the least human parts of the work. It’s great at the repetitive things. It’s good at the analytical tasks where all the data is available.
But AI has no capacity for genuine care, love, wonder, or curiosity. Use your AI tools to give you more time for those, not to replace them.
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We’d love to hear from you! Tell us what you’d like to hear us talk about more. Maybe share a challenge you’re facing in your work that would benefit from a Humanizing Work perspective. Shoot us a quick email at info@humanizingwork.com.
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