The Real World of Tuesday Afternoon

The real world of technology, in Franklin's framework, is not the world of product demonstrations, conference keynotes, or quarterly earnings presentations. It is the world of Tuesday afternoon—where the tool is used by an actual person, in an actual organization, under actual constraints of time and budget and attention, with actual fears, ambitions, and limitations characterizing human work. The demonstration world is where benefits are displayed. The real world is where costs are paid. Franklin insisted that any honest analysis of technology must begin in the real world because that is where consequences are experienced by people with least power to refuse them. Applied to AI: a software engineer sits at her desk at 2:14 on Tuesday. She has been working with AI coding tools for eight months. She is good at her job, measurably more productive now, her throughput roughly tripled. At 2:14, the AI generates a database query optimization she did not request. The restructuring is elegant, would probably