The United States Postal Service (USPS) appears in The Bob Zadek Show as a case study in the limits of automation, introduced by guest Luis Perez-Breva during an episode devoted to artificial intelligence myths. The excerpts do not discuss the agency’s structure, finances, legal status or history; the USPS enters the conversation only as an example of an organization that attempted to replace human workers with technology and, in Perez-Breva’s account, suffered for it.
The automation case study
Bob Zadek opened the segment by asking for an example of an attempt to replace a human with artificial intelligence that failed, noting that machines had learned to play chess and Jeopardy well. Perez-Breva adjusted the framing, saying that the best examples are places where people believed resource allocation technologies had evolved enough that they could forget about humans, and named the United States Postal Service as one of the most common examples in the business literature Luis Perez-Breva on Artificial Intelligence Myths (2017).
According to Perez-Breva, the USPS made a decision 20 years earlier that it needed to cut its human workforce because there were easier ways to automate routes and it could solve part of the problem with computers. He said the agency did so, and that according to most business experts the USPS today missed on the flourishing of the parcel delivery business, with UPS and others taking over from them mostly because they lost all the human expertise along the process. His conclusion was that every time people think automation—not even AI, just automation—can fully replace humans, they shoot their own foot, in a long-term kind of foot-shooting.
Zadek’s challenge: bad execution or impossible task
Zadek pressed the point directly, asking whether the post office simply did it badly, such that the task could have been done but was done poorly, or whether the nature of the task itself made it inherently impossible. Perez-Breva conceded that to answer fully and to be fair to the USPS system he would need to know more about exactly what they did. His guess, based on how he knows the field, was that there is no way for anybody who thinks they can remove humans through automation to win in the long term—just no way Luis Perez-Breva on Artificial Intelligence Myths (2017).
He then generalized: automation allows us to free humans who used to do easily automated tasks so they can do more value-adding things. If you are replacing a human with automation, he said, it has probably been a long time since you stopped listening to what that human has to say about improving their own processes, and so you have forgotten or stopped imagining how you could reach further. The failure, in his account, has little to do with automation or the task itself; it is that using technology to replace humans rather than enable them to reach further is a misuse of the technology, whether it is AI or something else.
Across episodes
Only one episode in the excerpts touches the United States Postal Service, so the excerpts show no development in the show’s treatment of the topic.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts do not state when the USPS was founded, how it is organized, what statutes govern it, or what its current financial condition is. They do not name the decision-makers behind the workforce reduction, the year it occurred beyond Perez-Breva’s “20 years ago,” or any document, case or bill connected to it. The claim that UPS and others took over the parcel delivery business is attributed to Perez-Breva’s recollection of business experts, not to any source the episode cites. Nothing in the excerpts describes the USPS’s legal obligations, monopoly status or relationship to Congress.