Eliminating the Human
I feel he makes a mistake in introducing the issue of engineering introversion and (dread the word) the spectrum.<p>This desire to reduce human interaction is driven by the desires of the average consumer. In many of the projects I&#x27;ve worked on this is explicit. People want control, transparency and automation. There are services whose entire selling point is reducing the unpredictability of human interactions for consumers. For example, many people would not use taxis historically because they felt the pricing was not transparent and at the whim of a person they would have to negotiate with. People find this stressful.<p>Sometimes the automation makes the rules of interaction much more explicit too. A lot of people are nervous of picking up the phone to, say, something as simple as a restaurant and being told, NO you can&#x27;t have a table for Saturday. If they book online they can see the availability and not have what they find the social embarrassment of even such a mild rejection.<p>Personally, I am all for human interaction. I positively seek it out. But I do not think this is the trend. A lot of people are almost afraid to pick up the phone, or ask for something that isn&#x27;t on a menu, or ask for a discount, or negotiate a price. And the number of those people is, in my personal experience, growing.