Take Action No Matter How Frightened You Are

I seem to be getting extreme views on technology in my feed and it’s easy to be confused about what’s right and wrong.

On the one extreme AI is viewed as an exploitative, unethical and uncontrolled.

On the other it’s viewed as a panacea, the universal solution, the answer to our prayers.

The truth is probably somewhere in the middle.

People and cultures adapt slowly. Some niches may move fast and break things but it takes decades for change to ripple through into widespread usage.

Many ideas we use to think about the world still date to the 50s and 60s – the latest thinking is still limited to small pockets of academic practitioners.

We could do with a model to help those of us trying to feel our way through new technologies – trying to figure out whether things like AI are good or bad, helpful or unhelpful, useful or wasteful.

And I wonder whether Part X, the model from Phil Stutz, the psychiatriast that’s the focus of Jonah Hill’s documentary Stutz, could be useful.

Stutz defines Part X as the “voice of impossibility” – the voices that dissuade and criticise.

Perhaps AI is coming for jobs. Perhaps it will make categories irrelevant. Perhaps it will destroy markets.

Or it will create new jobs. Create new categories. Create new markets.

The main thing for us, at all stages of our careers, is to figure out how to engage with this space, work out what it means for us, our firms, and economies.

And then take steps to understand how it all works.

As Stutz puts it – take action no matter how frightened you are.