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Comment by bckygldstn | Hacker News Reader

A human has a level of accuracy and decaying memory appropriate for the task of improving security for an apartment building.

They’ll stop a stranger walking out with a package and keep an eye out for your abusive ex for you. They won’t remember you coming home late 6 years ago shortly after someone matching your description left an abortion clinic.

They’re also human not an unaccountable automated process. They’ll let you bring home a new fling 5 nights in the same month without registering them as a tenant, and let a non-corporate delivery driver drop off a package without being registered as a SurveillanceCorp approved deliverer.

The concept of doormen is dumb, but we don’t need to automate away every human interaction in our lives.

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I agree with the rest of you comment, but I am curious to know why you think the concept of a doorman is dumb

In hindight, it was an unrelated and needlessly-negative statement that undermined the rest of my argument.

But seeing as you asked, doormen hit some of the aspects of US culture I've struggled to adapt to as an immigrant of ~7 years including

* Disproportionate fear of violence. It seems like doormen largely play the role of a security guard which is nice to have "just in case", without balancing against the mental harm of constant fear and anxiety. Let alone spending that money and mental capacity on actual problems like vehicle collisions and loneliness.

* An OTT service industry. I don't want someone's fulltime job to be opening the door for me and being nice to me for tips, it makes life feel like a sales call. Ditto for hiring gardeners to leafblow your tiny lawn every week all through winter, and the server at a restaurant checking in on you every 10 minutes. It's much easier to have genuine interactions and relationships with people when they are doing a worthwhile job for a fair wage.

The doorman at a certain medical facility in New York was one of the most AMAZING people I have ever seen. He was as much a part of those people's treatment as the doctors/nurses there. I often had to wait in the lobby during our software implementation for someone to escort me around and ended up spending a total of days worth of time in that lobby. He knew every patient. He interacted with people and made them feel human. I went home and cried every night the amount of human suffering that went through that place, but he lifted every single person I saw come through that door up and I imagine had a huge therapeutic benefit to those people, giving each one a personal, human, intentional and present positive interaction when they were facing horrible chemo, body part removal (people would have cancerous noses, ears, arms, legs removed), etc. Dude was a friggen saint and should have been paid millions the amount of people he touched and strength and positivity he had within him to give. I haven't had a lot of interaction with New York door men but that dude made me a lifelong champion of them. Sorry for the random off topic anecdote.

Counter point: a non human won't gossip with your neighbor about you bringing an overnight fling.

Might be better than receiving personalized ads for birth control and relationship/dating advice the next morning.

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