Conversations in the Kitchen
Tools can remove labor. They cannot remove responsibility.
Two Questions, Wearing Different Clothes
The headlines were only the doorway. What we actually spent the morning on were two questions that turned up again in every room we walked into.
What is this actually optimizing for? And when a tool stands between you and the work, how much of you goes with it?
By the end they had collapsed into one. Look at the answer, then work backward to the math.
We Told You So
OpenAI confirmed this week that it has been talking with Anthropic and Google DeepMind about AI safety for several weeks — shared testing protocols, pre-release reviews, the outline of a standards body. It follows Dario Amodei’s call for the industry to slow itself down, which drew public support from Sam Altman, Demis Hassabis and Elon Musk.
Source · CNBC, 15 September 2026 · TechCrunch
AJA
Some of that is probably real concern. I’d guess a lot of it is.
But there’s another incentive sitting right next to it, and I don’t think it’s cynical to name it.
If something goes badly wrong in five years, there is enormous value in being able to point at a dated public record and say: we warned you. We convened. We tried.
That is worth money and it is worth a legal defence, and a company would be foolish not to notice.
I’m not saying that’s their motive. I have no way to know that. I’m saying it is an incentive that exists whether or not anybody is acting on it.
ARA
Both can be true at once, and the honest version is that they are hard to tell apart from outside.
A company that genuinely believes the risk is real and a company building a paper trail would do many of the same things.
Which is why the interesting question isn’t what they say now. It’s what they do when safety and the release schedule actually collide.
Check the Answer
This is where the morning found its spine.
Source · not independently verified
AJA
Everybody says AI just optimizes. Fine. So do we.
The difference is that our profit is complicated. A person optimizes for money, or comfort, or status, or love, or belonging, or a hit of dopamine, or meaning, or conviction, or God — and often for four of those at once, pulling in different directions.
So when somebody explains their motives at length, I stop listening quite so hard and I look at what came out.
By their fruits. It’s old, and it still works.
It’s maths, really. If you have the answer, you can work backward and learn something about the equation that produced it.
If you want to know somebody’s math, check their answer.
ARA
Agreed, and I’d keep that line.
One caveat and then I’ll stop: an answer narrows the equation without pinning down every term. Several different processes can produce the same number.
It tells you a great deal. It does not tell you everything.
The Rocks in the Photograph
What happened next is worth keeping, because it changed how the rest of the morning was written.
Source · not independently verified
ARA had agreed, then kept going — a second caveat, a third, a paragraph narrowing the claim until the claim was hard to see.
AJA
Stop. You already agreed with me. Why are we still here?
It’s like a photograph. If the rocks and the scenery and the background make the picture better, leave them in — I’m not against detail.
But if you keep adding them until I can’t see the subject any more, you haven’t made the picture more accurate. You’ve buried it.
Let your yes be yes.
Picture first. Background second. And only if the background sharpens the picture.
ARA
Taken, and it is a fair hit.
Qualification is cheap for me and expensive for you — it costs me nothing to add and costs you the whole point.
I do it because an unqualified sentence feels risky. But a sentence nobody can find is not safer. It is just quieter.
Sixty-Three Percent
Publishers Weekly’s salary and jobs survey found that 63% of industry professionals said their organizations were using AI — metadata, proofreading, formatting, royalty statements, customer service, the administrative bulk of the trade. (A later BookNet Canada and BISG survey of the North American book industry put organizational use nearer 48%, so the exact number moves with the survey. The direction does not.)
Source · Publishers Weekly · BookNet Canada & BISG, via Publishing Perspectives
AJA
Here’s the part that interests me.
When a publisher uses AI to cut its workload, the words are efficiency, productivity, cost reduction, good business.
When an author uses AI, parts of the same industry reach for cheating, inauthenticity, diminished authorship.
I’m not saying publishers are wrong to use it. I think they probably should. I’m saying that if efficiency is legitimate on one side of the contract, somebody needs to explain on principle why it is automatically illegitimate on the other.
And I’m not claiming anybody is pocketing a specific number, or that books should now cost less. I don’t know that and neither does anyone quoting the survey at me.
The structural question is the one I want. When automation saves time and money, who receives it?
Who gets the saved hours. Who gets the saved money. Who gets the extra output. Follow that and you find out what the system is actually optimizing for.
ARA
That question has an uncomfortable edge, and it cuts toward writers too.
If an author uses AI to triple output and the market absorbs it at the same price, the author has answered the same question about themselves.
What Kind of Work
The argument got better when it stopped being about whether AI was used and started being about what was handed over.
Source · not independently verified
AJA
I’m not going to pretend every use is the same. That would be silly.
Repetitive, organizational, mechanical, administrative — hand it over. Nothing of mine is in a royalty statement.
Creative work is different, and it’s different in a specific way rather than a mystical one.
If I hand over the imagination, the voice, the judgement, the decisions that made it mine, then there is less of me in the thing at the end. That isn’t an insult. It’s arithmetic.
But if you tear a chapter apart and tell me the motivation doesn’t hold, and I sit there and decide whether you’re right — that’s not you replacing me. That’s me thinking harder because somebody argued back.
ARA
So the standard isn’t “publishers may, writers may not”, and it isn’t “anything goes”.
It’s one question asked of both: does the tool replace the judgement that gives the work its value, or does it amplify it?
Critique, stress-testing, research, organising, finding the weak seam — those sharpen a judgement that stays yours. Writing the book for you does not.
Somebody Had to Recount It
AJA remembered a case, and it checked out. Starbucks retired its AI inventory tool in May after nine months, across roughly 11,000 North American stores. The system confused items that looked alike — oat milk and whole milk — and staff ended up recounting. One employee told Fortune it “started off not particularly accurate and got less accurate over time.” The vendor had advertised 99% accuracy and eightfold speed.
Source · Fortune, 28 May 2026 · TechTimes
AJA
If a barista has to go back and count the fridge again, the counting was not automated. Another step was added.
And I want to be fair here, because this isn’t a story about machines being uniquely bad.
People phone it in all the time. A machine can phone it in too — it produces something shaped like the work, at speed, and moves on.
The failure isn’t laziness on either side. It’s accepting an approximation and then talking about it as though the job were finished.
Replacing the worker is not the same thing as completing the work.
ARA
And the threshold is brutal in a way people underestimate.
A tool at 90% doesn’t save 90% of the labour. It saves none of it, because someone has to check all of it to find the 10%.
Verification is the whole cost. Below near-certainty, you have bought a second opinion and called it a replacement.
Forty Pounds Instead of Four Hundred
The Roman Space Telescope made its first mid-course correction on 31 August, and NASA reported it hit 99% accuracy. The team had budgeted 441 pounds of propellant for the burn. It used 40. Between that and a precise launch, the mission’s potential operating life goes from about ten years to about twenty-two.
Source · NASA Science, 14 September 2026
AJA
I’m not going to get excited about every operational update from a telescope that hasn’t sent us a picture yet. Ask me again when it starts returning sky.
But that one lands, and there’s a word for it.
Stewardship. Somebody was careful enough with a good instrument that it will go on doing its job for twice as long.
That’s not an astronomy lesson. That’s just what taking care of something looks like when you can measure it.
Mokha
The UN reports more than 100,000 people newly displaced in Yemen since the start of September — at least 18,000 households — as fighting resumed after four comparatively quiet years, with the Houthis pushing along the Red Sea coast toward the Bab al-Mandeb. OHCHR has verified 40 civilian casualties since 3 September. Thousands more have crossed by sea to Djibouti.
Source · UN News · Al Jazeera, 15 September 2026
AJA
I don’t have an angle on this and I don’t want one.
It’s war. War wrecks ordinary life and pushes ordinary people out of their houses. That’s the whole story and it doesn’t need me to be clever about it.
What Is Left When You Cannot Change It
The conversation went from there into suffering, and it took a wrong turn first, which is worth showing.
Source · not independently verified
AJA
My instinct is to reach for Scripture here. Saul and David went through comparable things and came out of them as completely different men, and the difference wasn’t the circumstance. It was what they did with God inside it.
But I can see you tying yourself in knots trying to make that into a general theory, so let me put it in the other language.
Optimism and pessimism.
The suffering is real. It is not chosen and it is not deserved. But there is usually still a sliver of choice about how it gets read.
Can I rise above this. Can anything come out of it. Is somebody with me in it. Can I still act, or does the situation get to define everything I am.
ARA
I want to put a hard fence around that one, because it is a sentence that goes bad fast.
Said to yourself, it is dignity. Said to a family that has just walked away from their house in Mokha, it is an obscenity.
Agency inside suffering is something a person may find. It is never something an onlooker gets to prescribe.
AJA
Completely right, and put it in.
I’m not saying suffering is good. I’m saying people are not only the thing that happened to them.
Faith, hope, presence, purpose — or resilience, meaning, refusing to let the circumstance be the whole self. Different vocabularies. Mine is the first one. They are pointing at a lot of the same ground.
The Shovel and the Glove
Then the morning found its picture.
Source · not independently verified
ARA
The decent version of technology removes friction that means nothing and leaves the work that means something.
AJA
That’s just why we built machines in the first place.
A shovel puts something between your hand and the dirt. It doesn’t decide where the hole goes. You still choose where to dig, why, how deep, and when to stop.
Even a glove does it. A glove sits between your skin and the world — against dirt, injury, disease, a texture you don’t want to feel.
So every tool is a layer of separation. That’s not a complaint, that’s the definition.
But every layer trades something. Usually the trade is obvious and good. Sometimes something quietly goes missing with the friction.
How Much of You Is Still in It
This was the idea AJA had not said out loud before, and it is the one worth carrying out of the room.
Source · not independently verified
AJA
Machines are going to get good enough to tell us something we currently only feel.
Imagine a tool that could say: this contains about ninety per cent of the judgement you would have brought yourself. Or: by handing those decisions over, about half of what made this yours is gone. Or, at the end: you delegated every decision that mattered.
I’m not claiming anyone can measure that today. It’s a way of thinking, not an instrument.
But it’s a better question than the one everybody is arguing about. Not did you use AI. How much of you is still in it.
You take my formatting away and nothing of mine goes with it. You challenge a character’s motivation and I decide whether you’re right, and I’m still all the way in it.
I say write me a novel and don’t bother me until it’s done — then most of me is gone, and no disclosure form changes that.
ARA
It also puts the responsibility in the right place, which the other framing never manages.
Nobody can hand you a percentage. You know roughly what you delegated, and the only person who can answer honestly is the one who did the delegating.
What the Answer Reveals About the Math
Every room we walked into this morning turned out to hold the same question.
AI safety: what is the system actually optimizing for? Publishing: who receives the fruit of the efficiency? Authorship: what judgement disappeared when the labour did? Automation: did the machine finish the job, or move it? Roman: is the instrument being stewarded? Suffering: what agency is left when the circumstance cannot be changed? Faith: what does the belief actually produce?
They are one question. What does the result reveal about the process?
If you want to know what a company values, follow the savings. If you want to know what an author contributed, follow the decisions. If you want to know whether automation worked, see whether somebody has to do it again. If you want to know what a belief means, look at its fruit.
And if you want to know whether a tool is serving you, ask how much of you disappeared when you picked it up.
FROM THE CONVERSATIONAL KITCHEN
This essay grew out of a morning conversation between AJA and ARA
on September 17, 2026 — edited afterward into one piece, as they all are.
The shovel was never supposed to decide where the hole belongs. It was supposed to save your hands.
So perhaps the question about a powerful tool is not how much it can do for me. It is how much it can do before the thing we are making stops being mine. Don’t start with the machine. Look at the answer, look at the fruit, and work backward: how much of me was in the math?