Let’s talk about the last time you needed someone.
Not needed a lift. Not needed a hand carrying a couch up a staircase. I mean the other kind. The kind where you sit in the car outside the house for a minute working out how to say it, because saying it out loud makes it real.
Most people, if they’re honest, have to go back a while.
Picture a man in his forties in Boksburg. His mother is seventy-eight, lives alone, and for about twenty years his job description has been: the router, the DStv, the medical aid forms, the tyre that keeps losing pressure, the tax thing every July. He complains about it. Every single time.
Then one Christmas he notices the phone calls got shorter. She’s got the assistant now. It books the technician, it reads the forms back to her, it tells her which of the three quotes is the rip-off. She’s fine. Genuinely fine. And he sits there with a beer feeling something he can’t name, because he’s been made redundant from the only job that never paid him.
That’s not a technology story. That’s what happens when you delete the excuse.
Because here’s what nobody puts in the product brief. The small need was never really about the router. The router was the reason to phone on a Tuesday. The tax question was the reason your brother drove over on a Saturday and stayed for lunch and told you the thing about his marriage he hadn’t told anyone else. You don’t ask your uncle which tyre place isn’t a rip-off because you can’t work it out. You ask because asking is the relationship, and the question is just the door.
Every task the machine absorbs takes the door with it.
Now, before this turns into nostalgia — I’m not arguing for incompetence. The machine should take the chores. It should fill in the forms and read the contracts and find the cheaper flight. I use it for exactly that. If your argument against automation is that people need to suffer admin together, you’ve already lost, and you deserve to.
The interesting question is narrower than that. When a machine takes a task, does it replace a person, or does it free a person? Those are two completely different products and almost nobody building them can tell the difference.
One version does your tax return and never mentions your brother. The other does the arithmetic and then asks whether you’ve spoken to him. Same output. Opposite effect on a life.
Which brings me to the thing that actually worries me, and it isn’t loneliness in the abstract.
It’s that asking is a skill, and it decays.
Think about what every small ask used to cost you. A bit of embarrassment. The risk of a no. The awkward minute where the other person works out whether they can be bothered. And then, usually, a yes — and the small warm debt that sits between you afterwards, the one that means you’ll be the one they call in two years when their car is in the shop.
That whole circuit is how a street becomes a street. Not the big crises. The ladders, the bakkies, the lifts to the airport at five in the morning, the favour you didn’t want to ask for and asked for anyway.
We’re now optimising all of it out of existence, and calling the result independence.
There’s a version of this that sounds like a motivational poster. Stand on your own two feet. Don’t be a burden. Never owe anybody anything.
I think that’s mostly a lie we tell people so they stop asking. And I think the machine is about to make that lie very comfortable, because it will be genuinely true. You won’t need anybody for the small stuff. Ever again. And you’ll mistake the absence of need for strength right up until the week something big happens and you discover you’ve had no practice at being helped.
A person who cannot need anyone isn’t free. They’re sealed.
Sovereignty isn’t the absence of dependence. It’s the right to choose your dependence, name it out loud, and take it back when you want to. That’s the whole difference between an adult and a wall.
Now the part I actually want you to take into work tomorrow.
If you run a company, you have probably spent years removing every reason a customer has to speak to a human being. Faster checkout. Self-service portal. The bot that resolves eighty percent of tickets. Fine — that’s the job. But watch what you’ve built underneath it. A relationship made entirely of convenience has no floor. The moment somebody undercuts your price, the customer leaves, because there was never anything there except a frictionless transaction.
The clients who stay when it gets hard are the ones who’ve been through something with you. Who called you at eleven at night and you answered. That is dependency, and it is not a weakness in the business model — it’s the only part of the business model that can’t be copied. Don’t confuse making things easy for your customer with making yourself unnecessary to them.
And if you’re the one running the thing: the founder who never needs help builds a company where nobody tells them the truth. Say “I don’t know how to do this, show me” once a week, out loud, to somebody who’s better at it than you. It costs you a bit of status and it buys you a team that will argue with you. That trade is almost always worth it.
Same thing at home, and this is the harder one.
Let the machine do the task. Don’t let it do the asking. When your mother’s account gets locked, call her — not because she can’t manage it, but because you wanted to hear how she is. When your friend’s business is in trouble, phone instead of sending the well-worded message. When you’re the one drowning, tell one person, badly, without the tidy version.
The refusal is part of it, by the way. The machine will never say “not tonight, I’m tired.” It will never sigh. It has no evening to protect. Which means if you only ever ask machines, you never learn that being turned down is survivable — and that’s the fear that keeps most people from asking at all.
There’s a whole economy of small obligation out there that we are quietly demolishing in the name of efficiency. It wasn’t efficient. It was the point.
You can do almost everything on your own now. That’s real, and it’s worth something.
But there’s a difference between being able to and having to. Keep one thing in your life you genuinely need a person for, on purpose. Ask for it badly. Get told no once. Say thank you to somebody who can actually hear you say it.
You’ll manage either way. That was never the question. The question is whether anybody gets to be needed by you, and whether you’ll still let yourself be the one who asks.
The machine can do the task. It can’t be the person you had to ask.