Of Chatbots and Chickens

The age of automation and Ikigai

Photo by Zosia Korcz on Unsplash

Two Trends I’m Noticing

We often look ahead with no idea what is coming our way. We just as often look back and feel everything that did happen was evident in retrospect.

It’s easy to find the light switch once the light is on.

Chickens

Aaron lives along the running trail through our neighborhood. His house backups up to it, so when he started raising chickens in his backyard, it became part of my runs to watch the progress.

At first, there was a small hen house and one chicken. Later I noticed a second chicken. Then when everyone was home during the pandemic, he built a deluxe multi-story hen house and added a couple more hens.

It wasn’t long before another family whose house backed up to the trail started raising chickens. Then another and another.

Now many families in my neighborhood host henhouses with egg-producing occupants.

Apparently, it is a ‘thing’ around the country.

Aaron told me he’d never had a pet before. Once he got the first chicken, he added the chickens I mention and then a dog. He said the chicken was his ‘gateway’ pet.

Chatbots

For fun, I asked a chatbot to tell me what a chatbot was and how it was used. This is what it gave me.

A chatbot is a computer program that simulates conversation with users to automate customer service, provide information, and assist with transactions. Some use natural language processing, while others use pre-programmed responses. They can be integrated into various platforms.

The world is abuzz with talk of Artificial Intelligence, most specifically chatbots that have become widely available.

For research on this article, I asked the chatbot if there were more people or chickens in the world.

📌 It told me people outnumbered chickens as there are 8 billion humans and only 23 billion chickens.

While I’m no artificial intelligence expert, that answer does not give me confidence that AI will take over the world any time soon.

Ikigai

Most of those 23 billion chickens are raised on farms ranging from family farms to industrial-size operations.

Even though most chickens are raised that way, there remains room for Aaron and my other neighbors.

There is room for people who do things themselves. Raise your own chickens for healthy food, for a connection to nature, as a learning opportunity, and for the sheer fun of doing it.

There is no doubt that AI will produce a significant volume of writing in many forms at some point, as the giant chicken farms do with chicken.

And like Aaron and the other artisan chicken farmers, there will remain a place for artisan writers. People who write original content to express their thoughts, their art, and their humanity.

And like the difference between industrialized food and farm fresh eggs, the industrialized paragraphs of AI will pale in comparison to the writer expressing their Ikigai in words.