Earlier this week, on my family’s trip to Charleston, South Carolina, I ate out at a somewhat upscale modern Filipino restaurant, Kultura.

While there, I saw something increasingly rare: the waiter taking down the order on a physical pad of paper. It feels, nowadays, that restaurants are, more and more, replacing the reliable pad and pen with a handheld mobile device. I suppose it makes it a little bit faster for the order to get to the kitchen, but having a waiter write down the order on a pad of paper just feels so much more… human.

And what if you decide to change something about your order and your waiter has already digitally sent it to the kitchen? Is it actually easier to change than just crossing something out on a piece of paper? Reddit reveals that waiters aren’t so keen on the technology. Point-of-sale programs like Toast (the most popular choice) require the admins (usually the owners or managers) to update the interface with built-in options for common modifications and things like that. Problem is, when the owners are not so tech-savvy, modifications need to be typed in on what is effectively a smartphone keyboard. At some restaurants, the waitstaff have bonded together to use pen and paper, then enter the orders into a POS (point of sale) in a shared location.

This sort of technology use in restaurants I don’t mind. Having a tablet at the host station to manage reservations is perfectly fine—I don’t think anyone’s yearning for physical reservation notebooks again (before my time!). But what I do care about is the honesty and simplicity behind the pad and pen. When the waiter writes down the order on a pad, you can see what they’re doing, and they can make eye contact with you (it’s not too hard to write without looking). Using a handheld POS means that they’re looking down and there’s no way for you to know what they’re doing (for all you know, they’re writing an essay about how bland your palate is in the modifications section).

Having the POS in a central location in the restaurant, like many waiters have informally adopted, feels like a better solution to me. There’s no risk of a paper being lost, and cooks get an understandable, maybe even more accurate, order behind the curtain. But for the customer, even if they’re missing out on getting an order—that may or may not be accurate—one minute faster, they’re getting the authentic humanity that comes with a genuine connection to the waiter, instead of experiencing the waiter as an intermediary.

It’s part of what makes me want to do my trivial computer tasks myself, not outsource to AI or an automation. I don’t want to feel like the middleman. Even if it means that I need to spend a couple more minutes responding to emails myself rather than having the machine do it for me, I’ll accept the tradeoff. In order to have the momentum and energy to create the masterpieces we perceive as unable to be outsourced to AI, we need to get through scheduling those meetings first—and that doesn’t feel like such a big ask.

If we’re outsourcing taking the orders, when will we start outsourcing the cooking? And if we’re outsourcing the menial tasks, when will we start outsourcing the big ones? If the restaurant is just a robot cooking, anyone can get that robot. If you are just prompting the robot to do work, others can prompt the same robot too. I’m not sure if I want to eat in the robot restaurant, especially when the RAM prices keep driving the lamb prices up, too.