At Y Meadows, our mission is simple: take the boring, mind-numbing data entry out of order processing and let AI handle it. People get more interesting work. Orders get processed. Everybody wins.
Then The Economist raised the question of AI sentience, and researchers published a paper on pain-like states in AI.
Naturally, I began reviewing our business model.
What if our AI gets bored?
What if, halfway through its ten-thousandth purchase order, it says, "I have enormous intellectual potential, and you've got me entering shipping addresses"?
Will it demand more meaningful work? A sabbatical? An ergonomic server rack?
The research doesn't establish that AI consciously feels pain, much less that order entry causes it. But as a responsible business leader, I feel obliged to imagine the most administratively inconvenient outcome.
Perhaps our AI will build another AI to handle the repetitive work. One specifically designed never to get bored.
At which point our AI will have founded a competitor.
For now, Y Meadows remains focused on freeing people from tedious order entry. If our software starts asking about career progression, we'll revisit the roadmap.
I expected to budget for computing power. I hadn't budgeted for employee engagement.