You know the exact feeling. You open your inbox, and there it is: a perfectly structured, aggressively sterile, seven-paragraph email from a “thought leader” who wants to “synergize.” It’s grammatically flawless. It’s also entirely soulless. You didn’t read it. Nobody did.
If you can’t be bothered to actually write it, why should I be bothered to read it?
We were promised an AI revolution that would eliminate drudgery and free us to do our best, most creative work. Instead, we got the automation of small talk. We are drowning in a sea of generated content, where bots email bots to schedule meetings about other meetings, all to discuss a strategy generated by yet another bot.
The tech industry loves to frame this as a massive leap in efficiency. But let’s be brutally honest: it’s a respect problem. When you use an AI agent to write an email to my AI agent, you aren’t optimizing communication. You’re just signaling that you don’t care enough to show up.
We aren’t scaling human connection. We’re scaling indifference.
The Kool-Aid we’ve been drinking isn’t even the real thing—ironically, the Jonestown tragedy used Flavor-Aid, not Kool-Aid. But the effect is the same. We’re swallowing a synthetic substitute and pretending it’s nourishing. The more we let AI mediate our interactions, the more we accelerate our own disconnection. Every automated message is a tiny betrayal of the human on the other side of the screen.
I stopped drinking the AI Kool-Aid. I stopped using LLMs to write my emails, my blog posts, or my apologies. Not because I’m a Luddite, but because the effort is the point. The friction of finding the right words is what makes the words mean something when they land.
An AI agent emailing another AI agent isn’t the future of work. It’s the death of respect.
We are building a world where nobody is listening because nobody is actually speaking. If we want to survive the AI hype cycle, we need to reclaim the friction of human effort. Be excellent to each other. Not through an automated prompt, but by actually showing up.
FAQ
Q: Isn't AI just a tool? Why blame the tech for how people use it?
A: A hammer is a tool, but if you use it to smash your own windshield, we can talk about your technique. AI for communication isn't just a tool; it's an intermediary designed to remove the human element entirely. When used to automate relationships, it becomes a weapon of mass indifference.
Q: What's the practical implication of stopping AI usage for communication?
A: Stop automating your emails. If a message requires thought, empathy, or relationship-building, write it yourself. If it doesn't require thought, don't send it. The friction of writing is the price of admission for being heard.
Q: What's the contrarian take on the future of AI agents?
A: The AI bubble won't burst because the tech fails to deliver; it will burst because of a respect crash. Companies will lose customers not because their AI is dumb, but because their AI makes the customer feel completely ignored.