“It’s the economy, stupid,” was coined by James Carville, the chief strategist for Bill Clinton’s 1992 US presidential campaign. It was credited with changing the course of the campaign, and Clinton’s subsequent victory. It was simple, crude, and effective. Perhaps, because, more than any other country, America votes with its wallet.
We seem to have something similar going on at the moment with regard to AI: the need to dominate, to somehow win, as though you can win intelligence. It is the same simple, crude, approach, as though intelligence on its own can do something, Intelligence needs application, and application is a human decision.
We need another James Carville to point out that it’s the people, stupid. AI is an astonishing, scary achievement, perhaps most of all because it’s a mirror for the people who use it. The same technology that can show us how to fold proteins or solve equations can be used to shape social media, or bet on the apocalypse. Now, when it comes to authors, “stupid is as stupid does.”
I don’t believe we need better AI faster. Technology has always moved faster than our ability to understand both its potential and its risks, and we have enough AI already to tax our abilities to harness it. I believe we need to understand, experiment, and use the AI we’ve already got better. Intelligence, however we define it, is relative, not an absolute. To adapt another American aphorism: “Culture eats AI for breakfast.“
I think that many problems described as failures of culture are better understood as failures of conditions. In most organisations, people often already possess the skill and judgement the business needs; what determines whether they use it is whether they notice the moment, feel able to act, and believe it is safe or worthwhile to do so. Often, we would do better to shift our attention from trying to change people’s beliefs to examining what the firm organisation, invites or suppresses.
The central challenge is directed at leaders themselves: their habits, assumptions and reactions become the environment in which everyone else works.
AI is not the problem; leaders are.
If we put to one side for a moment the ability of AI to build a bigger Wetiko*, its potential to join dots, ideas, and create initiatives that might improve the human condition seems to offer real opportunity. In many ways, it’s a reverse Tower of Babel. Instead of somewhere that combines people who can’t understand each other, it has the potential to do the opposite. You take your best ideas and express them in whatever form you want, whether words, drawings, mind maps, or perhaps even paintings, and in whatever language you like. AI will find the commonalities. It won’t know what to do with them. That’s not its job, but it will bring back to people what people do best. Something to talk about: shape, imagine, and create.
We are, in the end, a function of the health of the communities we create, the leaders we accept, and what we leave behind.
Measured by what we are creating and developing in the moment that improves the human condition.
It’s the people, stupid.
*Wetiko is a term associated with several Algonquian-speaking Indigenous traditions in North America. In traditional stories, it refers to a cannibalistic being or spirit of insatiable hunger—often linked with selfishness, greed, and the destruction of social bonds.native-languages