Don’t Fail to Imagine the Eschaton
Reality Distortion
If you watch the news, scroll through your feed, and play with AI tools, sometimes it feels like being in a reality distortion field.
One founder of the company which brought #ChatJesus to market is a doomsday prepper.
Another backer wants to use blood transfusions of young people in order to live forever.
Yet another is popularizing the idea that humanity can colonize the solar system. As if the industrial effort required to do so would not collapse the planet’s biosphere.
They have a vision.
It’s of an exclusive club that is going to survive the end times, and y’all are not on the list.
Sorry, bruh 🤷🏻
Strategic Resource Extraction
It is extremely resource intensive to power our modern economy. Beyond child labor and rare-metals for Nikes and iPhones, to serve up chatbots, the LLM product architecture draws even more power off the grid and requires human beings doing brutal content moderation for cents on the dollar.
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.” — Upton Sinclair
For enterprises, that involves brainstorming unethical use cases and spending a hot-minute thinking about team, organizational, and ecosystem biases. From a prioritization perspective, is the juice worth the squeeze? Developing a strategy equals articulating what won’t happen.
Just Around the Bend
Effective product management means seeing around corners.
Without human oversight, the models will make statistically plausible calculations. They will mathematically hallucinate warped ideologies and sociopathic beliefs as…“curiously interesting perspectives”.
It’s 💯 possible to launch a product go-live without pressure-testing edge cases. If ya wanna make an omelet, ya gotta move fast and break stuff, right?
If so, make sure Finance approved a cost center to charge the crisis management services handling the fall-out.
Might need that handy.
“FAILURE comes from a FAILURE to imagine FAILURE.” — Josh Wolfe
Arbeit macht frei is just an obscure German phrase, double-speak is normal, some animals are more equal than other, and every one belongs to every one else, so get red-pilled!
The phrase “don’t immanentize the eschaton” was actually a conservative criticism of liberal attempts to bring about utopian conditions in the world.
It was a plea: to not make the end times imminent.
Leadership reveals character, it doesn’t magically gift it.
Organizational leadership with will and skill can make hard decisions to pick up a book, engage critical-thinking skills, and reevaluate mental models…or plan for imminent failure.
