The glorious inconvenience of humans

If you ask AI for a recipe, you'll have the ingredients list and method in seconds. Sorted.

It might not be as good as your mother's secret sauce but at least you won't have to put up with a 20-minute phone call blathering on about your family, her aches and pains, the neighbours and when you're next going to visit her.

And when you want suggestions about where to go on your next holiday, please don't ask your well-travelled mate. Sure, she'll eventually tell you her favourite destination but only after she's told you a dozen other things you didn't ask.

If you're struggling to word something difficult, an apology or a message to someone you've let down, definitely don't ask a colleague. They'll want to know what actually happened, they'll have an opinion and they might even tell you something about yourself you weren't in the mood to hear.

Ask AI instead. It'll give you what you think you want or need without all that extraneous guff.

AI will provide an answer with all the human connection stripped out – no digression, no random questions, no interesting observations, and no pesky small talk before you get down to business. It's becoming a faster and (almost) always adequate way of getting information. But is it better?

Meanderings can be more fruitful than the direct route.

Social media promised to bring us all closer together but for many it has done the exact opposite. Our interactions may be instant, but they're superficial and we're left wondering where the closeness went, replaced by a like or an emoji. We humans seem to make a habit of this: swapping something slow and effortful for instant gratification and only considering later what we might have lost in the process.

Having a proper conversation with an actual person offers all sorts of potential benefits, not least the essential connection our species thrives on. AI won't ever ask you how you're feeling or what's happening in your life (unless you programme it to and even then you'll still effectively be talking to yourself). You may not know you need to talk about how you are till someone asks.

Then, of course, you never know where the next great idea is going to come from. Those arbitrary anecdotes and casual asides may turn out to be far more important than the bit of advice or business recommendation you were originally after. A spark here, the germ of a thought there. That's one of the magical things about human interaction: meanderings can be more fruitful than the direct route to information. Yes, talking to another person can be inefficient, and sure, AI is faster and more convenient but potentially so much poorer an experience.

The funeral profession is one of the last where that 'inefficiency' of human contact and conversation is the intrinsic value of the service you provide. It's holding someone's memories with them; listening to the story of how he proposed or what she wore on their first date, how he danced, the way she smiled, her dad's war stories and his dog's bad habits.

It's the stuff that's not on the agenda that's the actual job. And if we're this good at it when families need us, maybe we could exercise caution the next time we need something and resist the urge for the fastest, most convenient answer.