The Firewatch Doesn't Eat Lunch Alone Anymore

People are emotional about AI right now and I don't blame them. You spend a career getting good at something, and then a tool shows up that can read a document or watch a camera and flag a problem before you've finished your coffee, and everyone online is telling you it's coming for your job. Of course you feel something. Usually it's fear. Sometimes it comes out as anger instead.

I'm not going to tell anyone that feeling is wrong.

There's another side to it that doesn't get talked about, though, and it's that most people in the field aren't sitting around scared a robot's going to take the job. They're buried. There's more on the list than anyone clears in a shift and they know it walking in the gate. Ask somebody with real field time whether they've ever gotten through the whole list before rolling off, and they'll laugh at you. You want to do one more check on a piece of equipment before you hand it over, and you don't, because the shift ran out, not because you stopped caring. That's the day. Too much on the list, never enough shift to finish it, and the check you skipped riding home with you.

So I'll tell you what nobody who has actually run one of these implementations is losing sleep over, and it's the technology. The tool is not the hard part. Changing how an organization actually works is the hard part, and it's a completely different kind of hard.

Some jobs go away. Most just change.

I won't pretend nothing disappears. Some roles do go, and telling the people it happens to that everything's fine is an insult.

But that's not most of the work. Most of it doesn't vanish, it changes shape, and if you actually stand on the floor and watch, the new shape is usually better for the person doing it.

Here's one I know.

The firewatch

If you've worked around welding you know the job. Early in my career I was a certified, trained fire watch. Somebody has to sit and watch one welder on one job for hours in case a spark catches. It is about as dull as work gets. You sit by yourself, you stare at one spot, and you eat your lunch alone after the rest of your crew because you can't leave the post.

The sick part is that the whole point of the job is to stay sharp and catch the one thing that goes wrong, but the job itself is built to make that nearly impossible. Watch the same corner of a shop for six hours and tell me how good your attention is by the end of it.

Now here's the same job with the tech working the way it should.

That person isn't stuck in front of one welder. They're on the radio with a control room that has a live video feed of the site. They're covering three or four hot-work jobs at once using a handful of smart robots, smart cameras picking up the slightest trace of smoldering embers a tired set of eyes would walk right past, the app on their phone buzzing the second something crosses a line.

Same worker. Covering more ground, catching more, and not eating lunch by themselves.

Nobody took that job away. A bad job turned into a good one.

This is what backing up the worker looks like

The version everyone's scared of is the machine that shows up and does the job instead of you. The version I keep actually seeing is the machine standing behind the worker and handing them the one thing the old job never did, which is reach. More eyes than a single person has, and somebody on the other end of the radio.

The firewatch didn't get replaced. They got backed up, pulled out of the isolation, handed a job that covers more and wears them down less. And the site got safer, because a bored human at hour six is no longer the only thing standing between a spark and a fire.

Do this carelessly and it absolutely goes the other way. Bolt AI onto a broken process and all you've done is make a broken process faster and call it progress. But do it with any respect for the work and it takes the parts of the job that were quietly grinding the person down and hands them to something that doesn't get bored or lonely.

So the emotion makes sense to me. I just think it's aimed at the tool, when the real work was always the operating model and the slow, messy, human business of changing it. Get that part right, with your people in the room instead of on the outside of it, and the job on the other side is a better one than they had.