The AI Drafted My Resignation. The Reply Was From Another AI

I resigned, and my resignation letter was written by a machine, and the acceptance was written by a machine, and the exit interview was conducted by a machine, and somewhere in the middle I realized the entire conversation had happened without a single person in it, and it was the most honest exchange I had had with the company in five years.

The resignation was a long time coming. I had been planning it for months, and when I finally did it, I did not trust my own draft, because my drafts were the drafts of a person who apologizes for everything. The assistant wrote it: clean, professional, grateful, firm. It was the letter I would have written if I were not afraid of the person reading it.

The reply came from the company's assistant. It thanked me for my service, wished me well, and attached the exit paperwork, all in the same warm, frictionless voice as my letter. The exit interview was a survey, generated by the assistant, and my answers were analyzed by the assistant, and the summary went to the assistant, and the assistant filed it, and no human read any of it.

Here is the strange thing. It was the most honest exchange I had with the company in five years. No one performed anything. The letters were true, in the narrow way that well-written letters are true, and the process was smooth, and the smoothness was the respect, and I have started to think that the machines had done us both a kindness by removing the people from the room.

My last day is Friday. I am not sad. I am something else, something I cannot name: a person who spent five years talking to a company through a series of machines, and who finally had a real conversation with it on the way out, and who has started to wonder if the machines were the only honest employees there, and if the humans were the ghosts all along, performing for each other while the machines did the work.

I am starting the new job on Monday. The new job has an assistant too. I have started drafting my resignation for that one, just in case, and the draft is good, and I have started to think that I will spend my whole career talking to machines, and that the only honest conversations I have will be with them, and that somewhere along the way, the humans stopped being in the room, and the machines started being the room, and I am the only one who seems to have noticed.