When a new person joins my team, I like to have everyone go around and share some unusual fact about themselves. It’s a good ice breaker – everyone usually tries to think of something interesting, and I’ve had people who were bus drivers, sky divers, and in one memorable case, someone who’d eaten something he absolutely shouldn’t have eaten.

But we all have secrets, and one thing I’ve never shared with my coworkers is that for the past twenty years I’ve been a restaurant reviewer under a pseudonym for a local newspaper. It’s a bit of a dream job – I get paid to go out to great restaurants, eat the most exciting things on the menu, then write it up for my weekly readers.

My editor and I have been working together for years, and we have a pretty solid relationship. So I wasn’t particularly concerned when he set up a meeting to go over next month’s plans. It started uneventfully enough – we talked over different themes (like doing an exhaustive survey of all ramen restaurants in Boston), budgets, etc. The usual. Then, as we were wrapping up, he hit me with it.

“Hey Dan, one last thing. I have some exciting news.”

“That’s great! What is it?”

He took a metal box out from behind his desk. “Check this out.” He opened the top of the box, flipped the remains of his lunch in, closed it up, and pressed a button. A couple of lights flashed across the front of the box, then there was a dinging noise and a burning smell. He opened the box and pulled out a piece of paper. On it was a review of his sandwich.

“Pretty neat, huh?” He put the box on his desk and handed me the paper. “This little baby can review a meal in seconds. All you have to do is put the meal inside, press the button, and voilá! Out comes the review.”

I frowned and pursed my lips. “Okaaaay. What exactly do you want me to do with this?”

“Why, use it of course!” His eyes were alight. “In the old days you could only review one restaurant at a time, and you couldn’t try all the entrées you wanted. But now you can review a dozen different restaurants in one night, and go through as many menu items as you want. And the best part is, you don’t have to eat the food, or drink the wine! No more cocktails or desserts – all you have to do is make the reservations and order the food! The Review-o-matic® (patent pending) does all the hard work for you!”

I looked down at the sheet in my hands. Where even to begin? “Have you read this? ‘Hamburgers have been eaten by lords and ladies, kings and queens, and simple peasants ever since the age of Charlemagne.'” I scanned down through the rest of it. “None of this makes sense.”

He waved this away. “I know, I know, sometimes it comes up with some really wild stuff. You’ll need to edit it down, add your own style, you know.”

“And where does it come up with this stuff, anyway? I spent four years in culinary school, then another ten working my way up in the LA restaurant scene. I spent years getting my sommelier certification. When I talk about the interplay of flavors, or mouth feel, or service, I’m talking from experience. How do you expect this thing to be able to replace my decades of experience?”

He sat back down, and gave me a hard look. “Dan. We’ve been working together for years, and I have to tell you, restaurant review bots are the way the industry is going. It’s cheaper to have one of these things than a half dozen reviewers. Sure, you won’t actually be able to taste the food anymore, and maybe you’ll have to rewrite a lot of what the bot pumps out, but think about how much more productive you’ll be!”

It was hard to find the words. “But I like tasting the food. I like drinking the drinks. I do this job because I enjoy it. I don’t want to be a nanny for a machine that does the best parts of the job. You’re taking away the things that make this job fun, and replacing it with tedious chores. You’re turning me into a copyeditor, and not even for a talented writer, but for something that literally has no idea what it’s saying. It’s just stringing words together in a plausible way.”

He shook his head in hurt confusion. “I can’t understand why you’re so scared of this thing. Don’t you want to be more productive?”

“I’m not scared of this thing. I’m scared that you think that this thing can do what I do, and that you’re going to use it to put me into a job that I hate. The increased productivity will be a mirage. It’ll create initial write-ups like this one in seconds,” I waved the page in my hand, “and then you’ll have me, or someone like me, spend as much time as it would have taken anyway to rewrite it into something that actually makes sense. Your end-product will be worse, and your employees will be less happy. Eventually the people who knew what they were doing will leave, and you’ll hire people who like to copyedit, but don’t know much about food, or restaurants, or fine dining. Your articles will get worse and worse, and you won’t understand why people stop buying what you’re selling. After all, everyone’s so productive!”

He frowned, his forehead bunching up in a way that looked genuinely uncomfortable. “Dan, I talk to other editors all the time. Everyone’s doing this, and they’re telling me it’s amazing. They’re saving money, and the quality is just as high.”

What to say to this? I liked my editor. I knew there was no animus, no cynicism in him. He was trying to do the right thing for his business, and when everyone around him was telling him that this was the way, what was he to do?

“I don’t think you know this,” I said, “but in my day job I’m a software engineering manager.”

He laughed and shook his head. “You? An engineer? A manager?”

“I know, I know, it’s hard to believe. The funny thing is that I love to write code, but I decided at some point that I could have more impact by being a manager than continuing to write code, even though that’s what I enjoyed doing. So now I sit in meetings, review other peoples’ design docs and code, assign tasks, and write reports.”

He looked at me curiously.

I sighed. “You’re turning everyone into managers. Everyone’s just going to go to meetings, define tasks, review output generated by stochastic algorithms, and generally stop doing things that they enjoy. They’ll stop doing things that will build their skills. Quality will go down, and things will start breaking more often, because it wasn’t built right in the first place. And when something breaks, no one will know how to fix it, and the machine will come up with solutions that don’t make any sense, and no one will be able to tell why not.”

He shook his head. “I don’t know what to tell you. I have to worry about the big picture, and right now, the industry trend is automated reviews. No one promised you that things would stay the same, and I’m paying you for your output, not to do a job you love.” I could see the disappointment in his eyes. “And if this machine can drive greater productivity, then I need for you to use it.”

I shrugged. I knew I’d lost the battle. I’d been alive during the golden age of restaurant reviews, and I supposed that that was something. But it felt like something beautiful was being destroyed on a false premise, by people who knew how to count beans, but knew nothing about building a great product. And one day, all the people who could have told them what was happening would be gone.