Technologically Skwair ▢ blog
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Print by Marian Hardey. We Are All Squares. March 2020.
Print, Broodie and the Moon, Mariann Hardey, 2025
$15,000 for a chatbot that customers despise because it cannot answer a fundamental question. $8,000 for an "AI scheduler" that routinely double-books appointments, forcing human staff to apologise for the machine's incompetence. $12,000 for a document processor that cannot read the specific industry forms for which it was purchased. $10,000 for a customer service tool that simply escalates every query to a human anyway. The receipt reads like a breakdown of a heist, except the victim signed the checks willingly.
This could be the opening of a dystopian novel; buuuuut, it is the actual, brutal balance sheet of a small-business owner on Reddit who spent $50,000 last year chasing the glowing promise of the AI revolution, only to find that half of their investment is already obsolete. (r/AiForSmallBusiness). We need to stop calling this "early adoption pains." It is something far more sinister. This is a systemic extraction of wealth from the real economy, the bakeries, the clinics, the local logistics firms, to the speculative economy of AI vendors. It is a transfer of capital from the people who do the work to the people who sell the hype. And for the small business owner standing in the wreckage of their budget, staring at a suite of tools that don't work, it feels less like innovation and more like a stupidity tax levied by Silicon Valley on anyone desperate enough to believe the pitch. Chapter One. The Moon in the Poultry Shed: The Conflation of Automation and Intelligence In R.C. Sherriff's 1939 novel The Hopkins Manuscript, the moon does not arrive as a saviour. It approaches as a slow, glowing inevitability, humanity watching with a mix of scientific prestige and deep denial until it eventually crashes into the Atlantic Ocean. This literary apocalypse shares a distinct DNA with the satire of Don't Look Up. Both narratives expose our fatal tendency to stare at the spectacle while ignoring the physics of the crash. We are currently living through our own Hopkins moment. We are staring at the glowing orb of "Artificial Intelligence," mesmerised by its lunar brightness, while ignoring the fact that we mostly just need to feed the chickens. The Reddit user who incinerated $50,000 on "AI solutions" only to find that half were obsolete is not a fool. They are a modern Edgar Hopkins who was sold a telescope to watch the moon when they really just needed a better coop. They note with a painful clarity that the only tools that actually survived the crash were "dead simple: basic automation for repetitive tasks." This brings us to the great Trojan Horse of the current hype cycle. We have allowed vendors to rebrand standard "if-this-then-that" scripts as AI to justify a tenfold price hike. They have taken the boring, reliable utility of a spreadsheet macro, the digital equivalent of Hopkins' reliable breeding hens (yes, really, read the book, it is GREAT!) and wrapped it in the volatile, shimmering skin of Generative AI. The industry is selling us the moon. They promise a celestial body that glows with reasoning and creativity. But what a small business actually needs is gravity. They need the deterministic certainty that if a file is placed in Folder A, it will move to Folder B. This straightforward automation provides real utility. It is unsexy. It does not hallucinate. It does not require a GPU cluster subscription. Instead, businesses are being sold on Speculation. They are buying Large Language Models (LLMs) that try to "guess" (cough, exploit) what the customer wants, rather than scripts that simply execute a command. We are paying a premium for magic that turns out to be a parlour trick. When the moon finally crashes into the earth in Sheriff's novel, the result is not a new utopia but a muddy, desperate scramble for resources. The business owner who spends $15,000 on a chatbot that customers hate has realised too late that they purchased a falling rock instead of a foundation. Chapter Two. The Escalation Tax: Friction Farming at the End of the World In The Hopkins Manuscript, as the moon descends to crush the British Isles, the protagonist Edgar Hopkins finds himself increasingly entangled in the petty, bureaucratic absurdities of his local village committee. They debate the proper storage of cricket bats while the tides are rising to swallow them whole. (Marvellous part about stocks and shares in crockery for you to discover too, as prices will go up if everyone's glassware is broken when the moon slams into the earth). There is a maddening disconnect between the scale of the catastrophe and the system's capacity to respond. The $10,000 customer service AI described by the Reddit user acts as the digital equivalent of this village committee. As I see it, this shows a layer of expensive, performative insulation designed to delay the inevitable collision between the business and the reality of its customers. The Reddit user notes that their expensive "customer service AI" simply "escalates everything to humans anyway." This reveals the tool for what it truly is. It is not a gatekeeper. It is a digital bouncer. I am going to apply my "Unsuitable Job" critique to this software. The promise of AI is that it will replace labour, but in practice, it merely displaces frustration. It acts as a friction farm. The business has paid a premium to install a barrier between itself and its clientele, a digital obstacle course that the customer must navigate before they are deemed worthy of human attention. By the time the customer finally breaches the wall and reaches a human staff member, they are no longer just a customer with a query. They are a survivor of the chatbot loop. They are exhausted, confused, and angry. The human staff member, therefore, does not do less work. They do more complex work. They are no longer starting the conversation at a neutral point; they are starting from a deficit of trust. Very likely, they will spend the first ten minutes of the interaction apologising for the machine's incompetence. The AI has not solved the problem. It has simply curated the misery. It has skimmed off the easy, low-stakes labour of the initial greeting and left the heavy, emotional lifting of conflict resolution to the human. Just as Hopkins fretted over his poultry while the world ended (Broodie!), these businesses are obsessing over "efficiency metrics" even as their customer relationships are quietly being pulverised by the very tools they purchased to save them. Chapter Three. The Obsolescence Trap: Building Castles on a Tidal Wave As the moon draws terrifyingly close to Earth in The Hopkins Manuscript, the scientific consensus shifts at nauseating speed. What was a mathematical certainty on Tuesday is a debunked theory by Friday. The experts constantly revise the trajectory, the impact zone, and the severity of the collision, leaving the layperson to build defences against a catastrophe that keeps changing its shape. Edgar Hopkins digs his dugout, but he is haunted by the suspicion that by the time he finishes it, the "science" will have rendered his spade obsolete. He is correct. The Reddit user's lament, "Half of them are already obsolete", echoes this exact existential dread. It exposes the dirty secret of the AI Gold Rush: these tools are being shipped in a state of permanent beta. A $12,000 document processor purchased in 2023 is not an asset; it is a fossil. It has become legacy tech by the end of 2025, not because it broke, but because the tectonic plates beneath it shifted. The underlying model, the "moon" of this metaphor, moved from GPT-3.5 to GPT-4 to whatever decimal point comes next, rendering the previous wrapper useless. We must recognise the economic violence of this model. Small businesses are being treated as unpaid beta testers for venture-backed startups. In the world Hopkins understood, the world of poultry and paddocks, investment meant permanence. If you buy a tractor, it depreciates slowly over twenty years. It is there in the morning. It does not require a firmware update to plough the field. But buying an "AI Solution" today is not an investment in infrastructure; instead, it's much more like buying a ticket to a movie that ends in fifteen minutes. You do not acquire a tool; you rent a seat on a hype train that moves too fast for you to ever get a return on investment. The business owner is left holding a subscription to a service that has already pivoted, standing in their backyard with a telescope pointed at a patch of sky where the moon used to be, while the developers have already moved on to selling tickets for the next apocalypse. Chapter Four. The Magic vs. The Metric: Grading the Falling Moon In the final, terrifying chapters of The Hopkins Manuscript, the moon ceases to be an astronomical curiosity or a source of scientific wonder. It arrives. And upon its arrival, the mysticism evaporates instantly. The moon is revealed not as a glowing god or a celestial guardian, but as a massive, heavy, and inconveniently physical object that has plunged into the Atlantic Ocean. It causes mud. It causes floods. It knocks over the tea service (oh, the crockery!). The magic of the event is stripped away by the brutal physics of the collision, leaving Edgar Hopkins to confront a reality that is wet, cold, and entirely devoid of enchantment. The Reddit user's final conclusion, "AI isn't magic. It's just another tool", is the digital equivalent of this collision. It is the moment the moon hits the water. For too long, we have permitted a fog of "magical thinking" to pervade the technology sector. The sales pitch for these tools relies heavily on the Black Box mystique. We are told not to worry about how the sausage is made (uh-oh, I've seen Soylent Green), or how the neural net weighs its parameters. We are told to simply trust the algorithm, to treat it as an oracle that operates on a plane of logic too complex for our linear minds to grasp. We treat software like a deity when we should treat it like a dishwasher. When you strip away the magic, what remains is often staggering incompetence. Consider the scheduler that double-books an appointment. In the current lexicon of AI, we are encouraged to use soft, forgiving language. We say the model is "hallucinating." We say it is "drifting." We say it is "still learning." We anthropomorphise the error, attributing it to a quirky, almost charming cognitive slip, as if the software is a precocious child trying its best. We must stop grading AI on a curve. Especially when it is not fit for purpose. If a human receptionist consistently double-booked high-value clients, they would not be described as "hallucinating." They would be described as incompetent. They would be retrained or fired. If a toaster burned the bread fifty per cent of the time, we would not marvel at its "emergent properties." We would return it to the store. Yet, when an AI tool destroys a workflow or fabricates a legal citation, we are told it is "emerging tech." Oh, how innovative. This is the great deception. A tool that cannot perform the basic function of the job, reading a form, booking a slot, summarising a meeting without lying, is not an innovation. It is a defective product. Like Hopkins standing in the ruins of his village, staring at the mud where his prize poultry used to be (Broodie the hen does survive), small businesses are realising that the celestial glow of the AI marketing machine has distracted them from the wreckage on the ground. We must reject the alchemy that promises to turn silicon into gold and return to the honest machinery of things that actually work. We must stop looking for magic and start demanding the metric. Does it work? If the answer is no, it belongs in the Atlantic Ocean, along with the rest of the falling moon. Chapter Five. The Billionaire's Charity: Buying the High Ground While the Moon Falls This dynamic, the extraction of wealth from the productive economy to the speculative elite, is not limited to the software market. It is the gravitational pull of our current moment. In The Hopkins Manuscript, as the catastrophe approaches, there is a distinct shift in how the wealthy prepare compared to the villagers. While Edgar Hopkins worries about the structural integrity of his hen house, the elite recede into fortified positions, insulated from the tides they know are coming. Consider Hmmm, let us look closer. I don't recognise this as philanthropy; it is a purchase of policy. It is the building of a private dugout at the expense of the village. Just as the AI vendor sells a broken tool to a small business to extract their capital, these billionaires are "donating" to a political project that is actively dismantling the regulatory state, the very state that might tax their wealth or protect the workers they exploit. They are not giving money to help children; they are investing capital to ensure the tax burden remains on the working class, while the top 1% retain their hoard. To my mind, the parallel to our Reddit user's plight is stark and convincing. The Small Business Owner buys a "magic" AI tool hoping it will solve their efficiency problem, only to find it is a broken toy that drains their budget. They are Edgar Hopkins, buying a telescope to watch the disaster that will bankrupt them. The Public is sold a "philanthropic" initiative by tech billionaires, hoping it will solve a social problem, only to find it is a Trojan horse for deregulation that drains the public purse. In both cases, the promise is innovation and support. In both cases, the reality is a transfer of wealth from the many who work to the few who own. The $50,000 spent on broken AI and the millions "donated" by the Dells are part of the same economic architecture: a system designed to convince the productive class to fund their own obsolescence. End. We are left, like the characters in Sherriff's finale, standing in the mud of a ruined landscape, realising too late that the glowing object we were told to admire was never a saviour. It was just a heavy rock, and it has finally landed on us. The small-business owner, desperate for efficiency in a crushing economy, is sold a digital homunculus, a promise of labour without the labourer. But what they receive is a parasite. It eats their capital, frustrates their clientele, and leaves them, in the end, exactly where they began: reliant on the only intelligence that has ever truly sustained the marketplace, the human capacity to listen, to understand, and to respond appropriately. Let us reject the alchemy that promises to turn silicon into gold, and return to the honest machinery of things that actually work. Comments are closed.
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