Escaping the "Torture" of Other People

Will AI make work better or just lonelier?

Mar 28, 2025

In his recent speech at the American Dynamism Summit, Vice-President Vance emphasized his optimism that new AI technologies will not destroy jobs, but elevate them, freeing human workers from the most mundane, tedious, and irritating tasks so they can focus on the most fulfilling, most human, most high-skill jobs. “I think there’s too much fear that AI will simply replace jobs rather than augmenting so many of the things that we do….Real innovation makes us more productive, but it also, I think, dignifies our workers.”

This is the future I would like to see as well. And I believe it is entirely achievable. But I can’t say that I trust the human race very well right now to rightly discern these tradeoffs; our default mode is to sacrifice dignity on the altar of convenience. Consider this viral tweet that came across my feed a couple of weeks ago:

As I myself had recently found myself at a restaurant, eager to catch my flight and needing to flag down a waitress to pay my bill, I had to concede he had a point. Surely, if there is any feature of modern daily life that feels like a pointless holdover from a pre-smartphone era, it is this strange ritual: flag a waiter, ask for the check, wait for him to bring it, watch as he sidles away to another table just as you stick your credit card in the bill fold, wait for him to come back and pick it up, wait some more for him to run your card, and then calculate your tip and sign the receipt. The whole ordeal can take up to 15 minutes. And surely this is not exactly the highlight of the waiter’s day—he has plenty of other customers to attend to, he’s already earned his tip, and presumably he can make better use of his time (and thus presumably more money) if he’s not shuttling back and forth to the till.

Moreover, while I have long complained about the trend to make smartphones a necessity of modern life, the author of this tweet was not suggesting that we make QR-code bill-paying obligatory, only that we make sure it is always an option for those who value the convenience. It would be hard to argue with such a proposal, and probably pointless to try—soon, no doubt, the vast majority of restaurants will offer this express pay option.

That said, I couldn’t help marveling at the passion behind the tweet: “torture.” An extra few minutes’ wait in your comfortable booth while you slurp down the last of your iced tea and digest your lunch is “torture”? The necessity of having yet another interaction with the human being who has waited on you hand and foot for the past hour, of looking them in the eye and saying “thank you” and hearing them cheerfully respond, “Enjoy the rest of your day!”—that is “torture”? Clearly, we are in danger of losing a sense of proportion as a society.

But this, of course, is what technology does to us: by steadily reducing the occasions for friction in our daily lives, by seeking to excise every experience of waiting in line, waiting for an answer, waiting for a page to load, it renders every remaining source of friction, every remaining wait or queue or delay, that much harder to bear. Our modern experience of patience (which, remember, means bearing suffering as well as bearing time—increasingly for us they are the same thing) is like trying to shrink an inflated balloon by squeezing it. Sure, you can compress large areas of the ballon, but this will simply increase the pressure in the other areas. As you stretch your fingers to try to cover every square inch, any portions you fail to cover will bulge grotesquely. So it is for us today—every square inch of our lives from which we haven’t yet managed to banish the burden of waiting becomes an increasingly intolerable source of friction, a “torture.” In this case, note, it is the torture of dealing with another human being. If, with Sartre, we accept that “hell is other people,” why shouldn’t we use technology as a stairway to heaven?

To this observation we might add the speculation that this QR-code express bill-paying will not simply be another convenient option for those who want it. We should know by now that this is not how our technologies work. Each new “option” reshapes the whole choice architecture, making the old status quo increasingly untenable. Joshua Mitchell brilliantly analyzed this phenomenon in his essay “From Supplements to Substitutes”: once a new convenience is introduced, a shortcut, a path of least resistance, it requires real stubbornness and curmudgeonliness to resist it. As fewer customers do things the old way, businesses increasingly stop prioritizing them. Consider: in a world of QR-code bill-paying, servers will be able to take on more tables and redirect their time and attention away from settling bills, so the handful of old-fashioned customers will of course have to wait longer and be treated to more eye rolls, until they finally throw in the towel and adopt the new frictionless path.

Now, again, all of this may not be that big a deal in this particular case. This may well turn out to be a case where labor-saving technology is a win-win. But if so, I rather doubt it will be because we have given the issue serious thought and attention from the standpoint of papal encyclicals like Laborem Exercens (which Vance name-checked in his speech). After all, that which at first glance feels like a mundane, tedious, and irritating task may turn out on closer inspection, to be the essential thing that makes it meaningful and human. I’m reminded of the great fable of the Golden Thread—given the magical ability to just skip past the tedious and unpleasant bits of life, we will soon find ourselves old, alone, and empty, wondering how we missed out on so much.

What might we miss out on if we started settling all our restaurant bills by QR code? Well, consider: people don’t pay good money to dine at a sit-down restaurant just because it offers a well-curated menu and better cuisine than they could make at home—in fact, if you’re lucky enough to have a wife like mine, the cuisine is often a step down! They pay in part for the experience of being waited upon—hopefully not in a snobbish aristocratic way, but in a way that values the humanity and personality of their servers. Some servers wait tables just to pay the bills, but many find real fulfillment in their work, and prize its opportunities for human interaction. Now, if the tweeter had his way, all this would still be theoretically true—hardly anyone is proposing restaurants with robot waiters at this point. But there is something brusque and unceremonious about just paying your bill and heading for the door at the end of a well-served meal, and skipping those polite exchanges in which both customer and server signify that they have (hopefully!) been blessed by one another in the evening’s meal. If I were to leave the restaurant without it, I would be conscious of having subtly dehumanized and instrumentalized my server.

Or, consider it from the server’s standpoint: would it make his job easier to never have to process the bills? Well sure, at first glance. But at second? In this new scheme, his shifts would come to consist entirely of a string of harried trips to and from tables to take orders and bring food, and then…take more orders, and bring more food. At no point would the rhythm be punctuated by the ritual of completion and gratitude that “bringing the check” comprises. He would do just as much work, but with fewer opportunities for acknowledgment, fewer moments of savoring customer satisfaction.

Am I romanticizing? Perhaps. To be sure, I am hardly a model customer, and many of my dining out experiences have probably ended with mutual surliness rather than mutual gratitude. It may be that most wait staff are accustomed to being dehumanized, and would scarcely notice the difference. I’m not sure. But such questions are at least worth pondering before we rush pell-mell to replace frictional human interactions with frictionless digital ones.

The same principle applies to automation and AI across the board. Again, I love the sentiment of Vance’s promise to use AI to enhance rather than replace human labor. But how much do we trust ourselves with the discernment to make those discriminations? Some of the work I do, I love every minute of it, and wouldn’t outsource it to an AI if you paid me to. Some of the work I do is unquestionably a tedious exercise in torturing spreadsheets, and there is absolutely no moral or economic reason not to hand it off to an LLM. And some—perhaps most?—of the work I do is somewhere in the middle: it is sometimes fulfilling, sometimes frustrating; it is work that AI might be able to do faster, but work that makes me a better worker and perhaps a better person—if I did not take the time to muddle through it, I would not acquire new problem-solving or reasoning skills, and I certainly wouldn’t grow in patience or self-discipline—or community. Each day I’m in the office, I get up at some point and walk over to a co-worker to ask how they would tackle a problem or find an answer, knowing full well that I could probably stay at my desk and just ask ChatGPT instead. But why would I want to give up the chance to talk to a fellow human?

To rightly weigh up the losses and gains of handing this work off to a digital assistant would require mature reflection and brutal honesty with myself. And that’s me speaking, as someone with advanced degrees and a decade and a half in the workforce. Do we seriously think that a young employee just starting out—much less a student handed an LLM to help them with their homework—would be able to gauge these tradeoffs accurately? Maybe I’m just an incorrigible pessimist, but to me it seems likely that most of us will find ourselves falling into the Golden Thread trap more often than not: eagerly embracing the wonders of AI as a labor-saving tool that “frees us up” to do the good stuff, and then wondering at the end of each day why we feel so hollow.

Recently Published

“The Resilience of America’s Hybrid-Enlightenment” (Mere Orthodoxy): In a symposium on James Davison Hunter’s new tome, Democracy and Solidarity, I reflect on how much of our societal breakdown in trust is the digitization of our experience, which not only encourages performative polarization, but cuts us off from the sources of genuine agency, where solidarity is actually forged in the fires of practical action:
“Where real political action is still happening in this country, the sources of solidarity remain robust, and resilient hope still holds nihilism at bay. Too many citizens, however, feel cut off from the possibility of authentic political agency. … Our political games, in short, are far more divisive and intractable than our actual politics. If we could tear our inebriated eyes off of the former just long enough to rediscover the joys of the latter, democracy and solidarity—and yes, a Christian nation—might again have a fighting chance.

Coming down the Pipe

“Falling in Love with AI” (WORLD Opinions): My latest column for WORLD, set to publish Monday, is a reflection on the themes explored by renowned technologist Jaron Lanier in a remarkable New Yorker essay published this week, “Your A.I. Lover Will Change You.”
“Family Formation and the Future: The Geopolitical, Cultural, and Legal Dimensions of Demographic Change” (forthcoming event at the Danube Institute in Budapest, 4/1): I will be speaking on how parents are mobilizing to defeat the porn industry.
“The Illusion of Freedom in a Digital Age” (forthcoming event at the Center for Public Christianity in Raleigh, 4/4): I’m looking forward to returning to Raleigh in a couple of weeks to speak on issues at the intersection of my writing on freedom and my recent work on technology. If you’re in the area, I’d love to see you there!
“American Ideals or American Idols? Thinking Christianly About Freedom” (forthcoming event at the University of Northwestern, St. Paul, 4/15): I’ll be visiting the Twin Cities on April 15th as what I think will be the last stop on my spring book tour. Should be a fantastic evening.

On the Bookshelf

Are We All Cyborgs Now? Reclaiming our Humanity from the Machine (Robin Phillips and Josh Pauling): Don’t let the unheard-of publisher or somewhat amateur book design full you. This is an extremely rich and thoughtful book thus far, offering many of the same insights of Barba-Kay’s A Web of Our Own Making, but much more accessibly, and grappling with a lot of similar themes that I’ve been talking about in this Substack over the past few months.
The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William Shirer): Up to mid-1940 now. Brilliantly narrated, profoundly illuminating.
All The Kingdoms of the World: On Radical Religious Alternatives to Liberalism (Kevin Vallier):

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