How am I doing? AI says: Fair to middling, you ignorant sloth.
The Wall Street Journal, which has touted itself as “The Daily Diary of the American Dream,” is sounding the death knell for the old-fashioned performance review. Those yearly, awkward, faceto-face meetings will soon be replaced by the ambient Dark Matter of life in the 21st century: artificial intelligence.
The brave new world of AI-powered job reviews will create a “constant feedback model,” the Journal promises, offering “candid, real-time assessments” of how you are faring in your job. Companies are interrupting meetings with live critiques and using AI to “evaluate workers’ emails and videoconference” sessions.
That sounds like the daily diary of the American nightmare to me. Some furshlugginer computer bot warning you not to raise your voice at Marsha from Accounting, even though she bounced your $147 expense claim from Outback Steakhouse with a brief memo: “Too much alcohol.”
(Hi, Alex! I’m The Boston Globe’s new RadikalKandorBot! Are you trying to be funny again? Or would you call this droll, that word you hate? Just want you to know I’m here and look forward to working with you!)
I’ve always luxuriated in a feedback-free workplace. Years ago an editor complained that my columns lacked “shoe-leather,” but I’m a writer, not a floorwalker. Perhaps my most treasured book review described a piece of my writing as “unfailingly amusing, not overlong, [and] winningly useless.” It’s those last two words I seized on — the highest form of praise.
In the newsrooms I’ve worked in, if they’re publishing your prose, you are doing fine. If the bosses don’t like your writing, they fire you. I’ve been fired twice, the second time with a Michael Corleone-like flourish: “It’s business, not personal.”
(Oh, boo-hoo! We feel so terribly sad for you! Maybe the next time we fire you, you’ll take the hint and stay fired.)
The Globe does have a feedback system of sorts, the online comments section. It’s the Wild West out there, with the remarks pretty evenly divided between erudite commentary, for example a limerick about Bill Belichick that began “There was an old grouch from Nantucket/whose resentments were stored in a bucket” and Not Safe for Work Notices, e.g., “This comment has been blocked.”
There’s a healthy lode of anti-Alex Beam material in my column comments. It’s said that when future conservative icon William F. Buckley edited the Yale Daily News, he often killed advertisements to make room for anti-Buckley letters. So a part of me is grateful to the nation’s server farms for hosting remarks like “Alex you ignorant sloth [with sloth emoji]!” Or: “This guy is less funny than Adam Sandler,” to which another commenter replied: “No one is less funny than Adam Sandler.”
(RKBot back again: Gilbert Gottfried, who laughed with pathological fervor at this own jokes, was less funny than Adam Sandler, but why split hairs? You used to be quite enamored of ad hominem attacks, Alex — feels a little different when the hominem is you, doesn’t it?)
As part of our dystopian future of “never-ending feedback,” the Journal notes that the Cambridge-based software company HubSpot is encouraging “upward feedback” from underlings to their bosses. (In another era, this was called bootlicking.) I can see myself effortlessly trimming my sails to the prevailing zephyrs. Have I told you about my brilliant, perspicacious editors? I hope you have at least 30 minutes to spare.
But kidding aside, I, of course, welcome comments and feedback from all quarters. “How’m I doin’?” as the irrepressible former New York mayor Ed Koch used to say. If you would rather send me a personal message, please email your comments to Notmyrealedress@fakemail.com. I’ll get back you just as quickly as I can!