I like writing in cafés because I can let myself get distracted at any moment. One half of the screen is whatever I’m working on, and the other is a page left open to receive information from everywhere.

It’s not intentional eavesdropping. I’m just unusually sensitive to this sort of thing. From the words people use to the way their moods shift, it all counts as information to me.

Right now, for instance, there’s a young man in the middle of a phone interview, getting visibly worked up as he pushes back against the interviewer on the other end. From the bits of conversation I can hear, the issue seems to be using AI at work. He says:

AI can’t solve anything. No one can replace me with AI. Refusing to use AI is a matter of work attitude, not ability.

It’s one of those conversations cut off at both ends. By the time I decide to pay attention to him properly, he has already unloaded his frustration onto the task of packing up his laptop and stormed out. The emotion he leaves behind is picked up by a newly dating couple sitting behind him. They are talking about relationships, and to open that topic they chose a question that is almost guaranteed to go nowhere:

Why did you end your last relationship?

Both of them give the classic answer that says nothing at all: 'We weren’t a good fit.' Their answers are equally evasive, so neither person can take the conversation any deeper. They sit in silence for a while. Luckily, the quiet is broken by the young man behind them, dragging his chair away with his backpack on and his temper still hanging in the air.

Waiting for a real answer to that relationship question, just like I was, is an office woman working on a PPT at a nearby table. She pauses her own work, then, at the sheer dullness of the answer, lets out a faint, contemptuous laugh through her nose. Realizing what she has done, she quickly pretends her nose is bothering her and wipes it with a tissue. She clearly doesn’t accept that answer either, so she glances at the couple once. Then she goes back to work, feeding prompts to AI so it can build her slides.

Another woman at work is the manager behind the café counter. She’s dealing with a drink that a customer has returned—probably because of the sugar. She stops a staff member who is about to argue with the customer, takes a deep breath, and has the drink remade.

I suspect she runs into this kind of thing all the time, which is why she’s long since become unruffled by it. But what if all of this were replaced by AI? A future café with no counter at all, just a cold machine. It would never make a mistake, and because the entire transaction would be between a person and a machine, the contract would already be formed the moment payment was made. The customer would no longer be able to use any subjective demand to force the machine to remake a cup. If coffee becomes completely free of human feeling, does the taste change too?

The employee who had been ready to argue is still somewhat irritated. He walks away from the register and leans in to whisper to the manager, perhaps still trying to explain that he didn’t fail at his job. The manager smiles and pats his shoulder. The woman who asked for the remake doesn’t care about any of it. She has already won the little game of getting the drink remade, and is now using her phone to find the right angle and light for a selfie. In that moment she is not important either, because nobody there wants to be her audience. The manager seems to think so too, so she sets the remade coffee down on the table with a blank face, telling the woman to take it herself, then immediately switches expressions and greets the next customer with a bright smile.

If you insist on putting it bluntly, people still believe these are the things AI cannot do: personal preference, subjective judgment, and the small but clever adjustments people make in their work.

Then another man comes to the counter and hands over an empty cup, asking for a cup of plain water. The young employee is just about to take the empty cup, but the manager stops him. She tells the customer to place the cup on the counter, then orders the employee to fetch a clean empty cup and use that to pour the water.

That tiny detail pulls all my attention away. Why does an SOP like that exist? Is there a larger history hiding behind it, a whole plot I don’t know about—something like a man having already put sleeping pills in the empty cup, and once that cup is handled by the café on its way to getting filled with water, the responsibility becomes the café’s too?

Crime always comes before the rules, and human awareness before AI. Maybe.