Finally, we are starting to talk properly about how artificial intelligence is damaging the brains of those who use it to make their jobs easier. But I remind you that this is a long-standing problem that AI has only exacerbated. That problem is managerial thinking.
You’re a manager, you have to make a decision, and the first thing you do is sort out what information you need to make that decision.
- If you’re missing any of that information, then you run the risk of making the wrong decision.
- If you have some extra information, then it confuses you and you waste time and energy studying something you don’t need.
So, in a world of immense and implacable competition where only one can win, it is important to learn everything you need and equally important not to learn anything extra. The winner is the one who can best become a primitive machine for effective decision making. You cannot learn more things just for the sake of building life wisdom or for the sake of growing in life happiness. If you allow yourself that luxury, you will be replaced.
By wisdom and happiness, I don’t mean blather about global responsibility or personal growth. That folklore is mandatory to stay in the managerial caste, it has nothing to do with real growth.
The bottom line is that if a company is set up this way, and if the competition is too fierce, it is devastating – in the first instance to the surrounding society, in the second to the individual. In recent years we have experienced the destructiveness of the neoliberal market concept, but some form of socialism could be just as destructive, where there was similarly fierce competition to see who could please the revolutionary council the most.
We need a world where one can safely say ‘I don’t need to be the richest. It’s enough for me to be moderately successful and to devote myself more to myself, to the growth of my own wisdom, to my friends, to the things I enjoy.” A world where the winner doesn’t take all. Not for well-being, but for survival.