> Mona hired two baristas and now manages them via Slack. She (of course) works 24/7, and consequently often messages them at midnight. She also asks them to pick up café supplies on their way to work, and to have them pay using their personal credit cards. She is very encouraging though, calling her team “absolute legends” and the “GOAT of inventory tracking.”

  > We are not doing this because we want AI to replace every café owner in Stockholm. Rather, we are doing this because we want to publicly show the current capabilities of AI. We see that frontier models are intelligent enough to manage humans, and if the trend of capability improvements continues, it’s not impossible that AI hiring humans will be common in the future. 

  > By running this experiment, we shift the discussion of how we want this future to look earlier in time, so we can better prepare.

This company has done a number of pilot programs for AI managed vending machines and at least one other store. You can disagree with them but there’s no question they’re serious about this.

I think if people are hoping to offload management and ownership responsibilities to AI, they should be prepared for the underclass to start sharpening guillotines again