Every now and then we read about companies that laid off employees, convinced that artificial intelligence could do the work faster, cheaper, and better. Then, months later, another headline appears. The company is quietly hiring many of those same people back because the promised improvements never quite materialized the way they had imagined.
Fortunately, those employees were still available, and that thought always makes me pause. The situation reminds me of an old Haitian proverb that roughly translates to, “Don’t throw away an old pot for a new one.” The meaning of that saying is not always obvious in developed countries, but its meaning does apply to our times.
The old pot may have a few cracks. It may have a handle that’s loose or a lid that never fit quite right. But after years of cooking with it, you know every one of its imperfections. You know exactly how much water to add before it leaks. You know which side to keep away from the hottest part of the fire. Its weaknesses have become familiar.
The new pot in turn looks flawless, until the first time you actually need it, and something goes wrong. If you’ve already thrown the old one away, you’re in a bind.
I was reminded of that proverb while watching an episode of Life With Lucy. Lucy and her business partner decided it’s finally time to modernize their business. They invest in a computerized system that promises to keep track of sales, inventory, and accounting automatically.
Everything works beautifully. No more shutting down the store to count inventory by hand. No more evenings spent balancing the books with a calculator. The computer gives them back hours of their lives.
Then Lucy decides the work area looks a little plain. She decorates the CPU with colorful stickers and magnets. The magnets erased the data and by then, all of the paper records had already been thrown away. The old pot was gone.
Advertising executive Rory Sutherland tells a similar story about a luxury hotel looking to reduce costs. Management notices they employ several doormen, whose only job was to open the front door for guests. From a purely financial perspective, replacing them with automatic sliding doors seems like an obvious improvement. The new doors would never call in sick. They don’t take vacations. They don’t earn overtime or pensions. After a while, they will pay for themselves and eliminate costs associated with a role that modern technology can perform more efficiently and at a lower cost.
The renovation is completed, the doors open and close perfectly, and no one can point to a single flaw in the system. But now, there was something different. Something has quietly disappeared.
Returning guests are no longer greeted by name before they reach the front desk. No one notices the couple struggling with heavy luggage until they make it inside. Returning visitors looking for a recommendation on a new restaurant or a neighborhood café now have to wait in line behind people checking in and checking out to ask for information. When it’s time to leave, no one is standing outside to wave down a taxi.
The automatic doors are doing exactly what they were designed to do. Mission accomplished. But the hotel discovered a little too late, that the doormen had been doing far more than opening doors. There was more to his job than being a literal gatekeeper, and I sometimes wonder how often similar decisions are taken outside of the hospitality industry.
A spreadsheet makes it easy to calculate what something costs. It’s much harder to factor in nuance and the human understanding of the “why” behind the numbers..
An experienced employee who seems expensive may also be the person who knows which customer is about to leave, which supplier can still be trusted, or which shortcut always creates more work than it saves. Those things rarely appear on quarterly reports, but they have a way of showing up after the person is gone.
Progress has always required change. Few of us would want to return to typewriters, paper maps, or waiting days for a letter to arrive in the mail. The question isn’t simply whether we should embrace new technology. The right question is whether we always understand what we’re replacing.
Sometimes we look at an old pot and see only its cracks, its age, and how worn out it is. It’s only after it is gone do we realize we had also thrown away years of accumulated knowledge about how to cook with it.
Maybe that’s why the old proverb never tells us to keep the old pot forever. It simply reminds us not to throw it away too quickly.