Technology is always about firing someone.

The value proposition of “technology” is usually that an employer can fire someone. It is always about doing more work with fewer people. This typically has a short term advantage for a business owner, but typically create poorer experiences for their end users over the long run.

Consider a banker, who may approve or disapprove loans. A human underwriter might be able to consider the totality of the borrower’s or insured’s circumstances, such as their character and honesty. A trustworthy, conscientious borrower who fell on hard times might still be a good risk for a loan, but the “numbers” fed into a machine learning model might reject the loan. In this example, skilled, caring bankers who build life-long relationships with the community are replaced with low-paid “bankers” who cycle through their job every few years.

Consider any type of “technology” that provides monitoring in a retirement community. This might include monitoring for trips and falls to incontinence monitoring or remote medical monitoring. Rather than having staff that visits the (lonely) resident and checks on them frequently, the inter-personal communication is reduced to only when an alarm may be set off.

Personally, I would cry to see my grandmother at a facility where they use “technology” to reduce human contact like that.

Firing people in the agriculture space.

I recently saw a pitch for an agriculture “technology” company. They were trying to optimize farms that used immigrant workers. One of their slides touted how a farmer might take a crew of 7 workers and switch to 6 workers to produce the same amount of output.

During the discussion after the pitch, one of the investors praised the entrepreneur because they were doing something good for the immigrant worker, like translating their “technology” solution into their native language.

I was horrified. This “technology” did nothing but hurt the worker, not help them.

Jamaicans in the apple orchard.

I worked in an apple orchard during high school. During picking season, we brought up three Jamaican workers. These guys worked from sun up to sun down every day for six days, then had Sundays off. They were paid by the bushel, and they worked relentlessly.

I got to know them a bit and hear their stories. Each one of them was in the US for their families. They were working 80+ hours a week because they had parents and grandparents at home, in-laws, kids, and a large group of people who depended on them. If they could provide for their families, their kids could stay in school rather than quitting to get a job to provide for the family.

It turns out that our Jamaicans all had other careers outside the 6 weeks they were working in our orchard. One was a tailor, for example, and the money he made in the US provided for their whole family for the year. Working a couple months in the US got his tailoring business off the ground.

How “technology” hurt the worker.

The “technology” company that pitched at our angel group was focused on how the farmer could eliminate as many temporary immigrant jobs as possible. They made a big show about how many workers could be eliminated.

This is what made me horrified when the investor praised the company:

Each worker they eliminated represented an entire family in a third-world country that no longer had the opportunity to claw their way out of poverty. It was one less man whose hard, dignified work would provide a better life for his kids.

To make things worse, not only would the “technology” reduce the number of workers, it meant that the workers who were here would have to work even harder. They would have to pick up the slack for the one who stayed home.

Don’t kid yourself: “technology” is about firing people.

“Technology” can create a vacuum.

A bank that uses a “machine learning” or “AI” underwriting process undermines why their people got into the business. Most bankers did not get in the business to punch numbers into a computer and get an answer. They got into the business to help people.

Bankers used to be part of the community. They helped businesses grow, they helped real people get a new car, buy a house, or put their kids through college. They used to be a person to person business.

Rather than helping people directly by understanding their predicaments and offering help, today’s bankers are glorified user interfaces to the bank’s internal computer system. They punch in numbers and read back the results. Their hands are tied – and their job satisfaction is terrible.

The skilled banker who built the personal relationships is outsourced to an inhuman machine learning algorithm. This creates a vacuum for the very purpose of that banker, which is writing the right loans to the right people, some of which will not pass the scrutiny of the algorithm.

Most “technology entrepreneurs” focus on the short term gain.

With every change, there are good and bad effects, many of which are not understood at the beginning (or even later in the lifecycle).

Startup entrepreneurs (and the ecosystem that supports them, such as angel investors, venture capital investors) are incentivized to find short term gains without considering the long term effects of their “technology.” It is a shame when the relentless pursuit of short term gains produces an overall inferior product.