If there is no love, let there be nothing

There are questions that seem to be about technology but, at their core, aren't.

What do we automate?

What do we delegate?

What do we keep under our control?

The more I think about them, the more convinced I am that the answer doesn’t come from a purely numerical, strictly engineering-based analysis of efficiency. It comes from something harder to measure but more powerful: love.

Love as a criterion. A concrete, practical criterion that guides decisions, defines priorities, and sets boundaries. And in a world where almost everything can be optimized, delegated, or automated, I believe using it as a compass is vital.

What do we love to do?

What do we keep under our control because the process matters, not just the result? What do we preserve not for efficiency but for our identity? How do we care for our community and environment with love?

I’m talking about love in its broadest sense: love for what we do, love for our surroundings, love for our community, love for ourselves. Love unites, creates, and gives strength. And yes, it also creates conflicts and friction. But it’s that friction that sparks real thinking, leads to meaningful decisions, and produces results that matter.

Love as a criterion for deciding what to automate

When love serves as the criterion, the question is no longer “Can I automate this?” but something more difficult: Do I want to? What do I lose if I delegate it? What do I gain if I stick with it? There are tasks worth keeping—not because they’re more efficient when done by people, but because the process of doing them is part of the value.

Because in that process we think, we make mistakes, we learn, and we come to know ourselves. Delegating that isn’t productivity. It’s a loss of connection with what we do and who we are while we’re doing it.

This doesn’t mean rejecting technology. It means using it wisely. The difference between automating out of love and automating out of inertia is the difference between freeing up energy for what matters most and stripping work of everything that made it meaningful.

Love as What Machines Cannot Replicate

We already know that LLMs don’t experience life. They don’t go through joy or pain; they don’t mature through relationships; they don’t know from within what love, work, friendship, and responsibility mean. They can mimic the language of care, but they cannot care. They can generate empathetic text, but they cannot feel what is at stake when someone on the other end needs to be seen.

Erik Brynjolfsson, a researcher at MIT, calls this the “Turing trap”: the tendency to build AI that imitates and replaces people rather than amplifying what people do best. When technology amplifies us, we gain capacity without losing sight of who we are. When it replaces us, we lose agency. And above all, we lose touch with what we love. The difference between these two paths cannot be defined by our environment. We define it ourselves, through the questions we ask before letting ourselves be swept away by the promise of infinite productivity.

Love as the Driving Force Behind Meaningful Work

If there is no love, then let there be nothing at all. Such a powerful and iconic phrase from Indio Solari, just a few days before his death. It is the phrase that inspired this post.

Applied in this context, I believe it leads us to a concrete conclusion: if what we do isn’t connected to something we care deeply about—if there’s no love for the process, for the people, or for the impact—then what we produce is just noise, even if it’s efficient.

I truly believe that talking about love isn’t naive, and that it’s becoming increasingly necessary. It’s what sustains our work when things get tough, what makes a complex decision worth making rather than delegating, what turns a task into something more than just a task. And in a world where AI can do more and more, the question that remains for people isn’t what we can do, but why we do it, for whom we do it, and with what care.

Love connects what we do with who we are. It gives direction to our efforts, warmth to what we build, and meaning to what we choose not to let go of. As a reminder that behind every decision to automate or not to automate lies a deeper question: Do I do this out of love?

It may sound naive. But I’m convinced of it. If there’s no love in what we build, in how we build it, and for what purpose, then we aren’t delegating. We’re losing part of our identity.

See you next time! P.S.: If you’re interested in leadership, innovation, technology, and how to empower multicultural teams, I invite you to follow me on Substack. Subscribe here and get every new post in this series instantly. 🚀🌍