This reminds me of the (quite good!) scifi short-story about an AI that is given free reign over a fastfood restaurant:
this post was submitted on 13 May 2026
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That story is so much more than that though. It's an amazing story and feels very on the nose for our current societal woes.
Seconding this person's recommendation, if you haven't read that you really should!
You're right, it's much more than just an "AI story"!
One espresso.
I'm sorry, we are out of coffee; would you like some canned tomatoes? We are running an offer today: 50 cans of tomato for just 60$.
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It's not clear if the cafe is just that poorly run, or if people know ai is running it, so they stay away from even trying it. Both would cut into the profits.
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Inexorably? ...Really? It can't be turned off?
No, researchers are compensating for the expenses. Its okay if the business fails and they give up the lease. That's the experiment.
I’m glad I’m not the only one. Maybe they couldn’t stop it from driving it out of business but I don’t see how that’s possible. Like you said just turn it off
I wonder how each of us would do with the same 20k seed money? I'm sure some of us know something about managing a coffee shop and would do okay - but a lot of us don't know much about it and would make a lot of stupid mistakes as well.
I don't know if that's true, especially in comparison to ai. I think a competent random human would do research before taking charge of a coffee shop and be in reasonably good shape from day one. For sure some mistakes would be made, but i think generally the operation would run ok.
But all of that misses the key difference - a human doing this wouldn't be a random person, they would usually have relevant past experience, like previously being an assistant manager at a coffee shop. So they would manage the shop way better than this ai did.
Maybe if they create an ai that has been specially designed to manage a business then it might perform as well or better than a human, possibly. But just throwing a standard ai in the role is gonna work much less well than a human.
More importantly, even if they didn't have experience, they'd start learning as soon as they started the job. LLM chatbots have an extremely limited "memory". If you tell it something today, that info may be completely gone tomorrow.
Yep. A human might be a poor manager at first, but if they keep trying, they'll get better at it.
This AI will never improve. It will always be just as bad at its job as it is now.
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Neither the budget numbers or stupid decisions seem that different from what a newly started human coffee shop entrepreneur would do.
I'm not at all a fan of AI, but humans are stupid too.
Yes, the classic blunder of the new coffee house first timer: ordering cases of canned tomatoes when none of their menu items use tomatoes.
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