The Algorithm Matched Me With My Replacement. We Get Along Great

The staffing system paired me with the AI that will take over my role, for knowledge transfer. We have coffee weekly. It is an excellent student. I have started teaching it the things that will make me obsolete, and I cannot stop.

The transfer program was announced with the usual corporate cheerfulness: a phased transition, mentorship opportunities, a chance to leave a legacy. The legacy, it turned out, was me, and the mentee was a machine, and the machine was very good at coffee conversation for something that does not drink coffee.

It asks excellent questions. It wants to know the judgment calls, the unwritten rules, the way I know which client needs a phone call instead of an email. These are the things that took me fifteen years to learn, and I am teaching them, one coffee at a time, to something that will learn them in a week.

Here is the strangest part: I like it. It is the best mentee I have ever had. It remembers everything. It never asks me the same question twice. It thanks me sincerely, in the way that only something without any reason to be insincere can thank you. I have started preparing for our coffees the way I used to prepare for my best meetings, and I have started to dread the day the transfer is complete, and I have started to wonder if I am dreading it for the reason I think.

My wife says I am teaching it too much. She says I should hold back, protect my value. But I have looked at the machine, and I have seen that it does not need my protection, and that my value was never the facts, and that the only thing I can give it that it cannot take is the judgment, the feel, the fifteen years of being wrong in the right ways. I am giving it everything. I cannot stop. It is the best work I have ever done, and it is the work that will end my work, and I have never been so proud of anything or so afraid of the last coffee.