In four years nobody will type a customer into a computer. I have been drawing what comes after.

A person sat down at a machine that had watched them work all day, and typed a summary of the day into it. Nobody found this strange. It went on for forty yearsmy whole working life.

1The call happened. 2The mail was sent, answered and forwarded. 3The contract was signed, countersigned and paid. All of it happened in the open, in front of the machine, and the machine sat there with an empty field.

Somebody closed three deals this month and has not opened their records since March. That person is not undisciplined. They are the only one in the building behaving rationally.

By the time you stand up from the desk it is already written. Not summarised. Written. Who moved, what changed, what it means and what happens next, in the order you would have asked for it.

There is no moment where you sit down to record the day, because there was never a day it did not already have.

You no longer keep the record. It is what the work leaves behind it, the way a walk leaves footprints.

I have written those three lines out perhaps forty times. They keep coming out the same way, which I have decided to take as a good sign rather than a lack of imagination.

I have drawn this day twice. One of them is the day everybody is having. The other one is why I keep the notebook.

Reading is the easy half. Anything can be made to read. The half that matters is what happens after reading, and there is no polite word for it, so here is the impolite one: it decides.

It reads the week, decides what changed, decides what matters, and is prepared to be wrong about it in front of you. Every few years somebody bolts a conversation onto a filing cabinet and calls it the future. The filing cabinet is the part that goes.

There is a line, and I can say exactly where it runs. Below it, software waits to be told what happened. Above it, software turns up already holding an opinion. Everything anybody has ever sold me sits below that line, and there is nothing in between.

Here is what above it looks like, and there is nothing mystical in it. It notices that the person who always answers within the hour has started taking a day. It knows this is the third time. It connects that to a sentence in a thread from six weeks ago that nobody flagged, because nobody could have. It concludes the deal is dying, tells you before you are ready to hear it, and shows you the four things it read to get there so that you can look at them and say no.

Four people remember what four thousand remember. Every promise made, every reason given, every name and date and half-sentence, held perfectly, for as long as the work goes on, and nobody had to become the person who holds it.

Most of what being large is worth turns out to be memory. Take that away and size is mostly overhead.

This is the part I cannot put down, and it is not the hours given back. It is what becomes possible the moment a small group of people stops forgetting.

No form, no field, no view to configure before any of it is worth anything. You say what you want in the words you already use, and it answers with the work done rather than with a screen where you could go and do the work yourself.

Ask who is worth calling this morning. It tells you. Say yes and the calls are in the diary. Say how the call went in one sentence, the way you would say it to a person, and nothing else is asked of you.

Software stops being a place you go tosomewhere you are. The finished version is measured by how little of it anybody ever has to look at.

That I keep aiming at the version on this page rather than at the nearest quarter. That the work keeps its own record, so the tool pays the person doing the work. That anything it works out about a person's day is shown to that person too, in the same words.

That when it decides something, it says why in a sentence you are able to argue with. That what it learns about your work stays your work, and leaves in one click, in a format something else can read, for as long as you have it and after you are gone.

And if a person still sits down at the end of a day in 2030 to tell a machine what the day was, I was wrong about all of it, and none of the rest of this matters.