AI and the Hotel Doorman
Efficiency has never been strategy
Rory Sutherland has been back in my feed lately with an anecdote from one of his books about the hotel doorman.
The ‘doorman fallacy’, as I call it, is what happens when your strategy becomes synonymous with cost-saving and efficiency; first you define a hotel doorman’s role as ‘opening the door’, then you replace his role with an automatic door-opening mechanism.
The problem arises because opening the door is only the notional role of a doorman; his other, less definable sources of value lie in a multiplicity of other functions, in addition to door-opening: taxi-hailing, security, vagrant discouragement, customer recognition, as well as in signalling the status of the hotel. The doorman may actually increase what you can charge for a night’s stay in your hotel.
— Rory Sutherland, Alchemy (2019), p126
With a constant stream of AI related layoff news, it’s hard not to wonder if we are watching history repeat itself — all over again.
When you are sufficiently removed from the last mile of work, it’s easy to think of software engineering as mostly writing code. And when AI can generate lines of code faster than humans can read them, it’s easy to see why this is happening.
But like the cost-cutting consultant, this is just another case of not seeing the forest for the trees.
Writing code was never the bottleneck of software development. And trying to 10x a single constraint can actually degrade the system as a whole.