We have become very good at removing the human from the process and calling the result progress.
Sometimes that removal is useful. Nobody is longing for more paperwork, longer queues or an afternoon spent repeating the same information to three different departments.
Technology can take real weight from people.
The difficulty begins when the person is treated as part of the weight.
A conversation takes longer than a menu, judgement is less predictable than a form, and care cannot always be measured by the speed of completion.
So the human presence begins to look inefficient.
That should trouble us.
There are moments when a system can complete the task and still fail the person. The answer may arrive, the box may be ticked, the interaction may be marked as resolved, yet something essential has gone missing.
Not every delay is waste. Sometimes it is the time required to notice what the system cannot see.
Technology should make more room for human presence where that presence matters. It should not train us to see attention, discernment and care as unnecessary complications.
Efficiency becomes dangerous when absence is mistaken for improvement.
The future needs better tools.
It also needs people who remain close enough to recognize when the tool has reached its limit.