AI and the Prosperity Platform

“I sort of love the Mirage (hotel/casino)–white tigers, orchids, floor girls tipping you the wink–but it’s life inside a computer game. I’m searching for meaningful interaction with the actual.”

-William Kittredge, Who Owns the West (1996)

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Human behavior changes, human nature does not. Or, to paraphrase Bob Hoffman, “Don’t focus on what is changing, focus on what isn’t.” Jeff Bezos had a similar riff on this. Bob was referencing marketing strategy. Bezos was referring to overnight shipping.

People are fickle, excitable, and prone to over-exuberance around novelty and new forms of stimulation that technology creates. In the tech world particularly, human behavior can and will change frequently and abruptly. Think TikTok, or the recent hype cycles around the Metaverse, NFTs, Crypto, Web3, Dischord, and VR. All of which have achieved their Peak of Inflated Expectations (hopefull) and are now well into the Trough of Disillusionment.

As with any perceived innovation, it is important to ask, if technology is the answer, what is the question? Because there is an entire cohort of technologists that believe technology is the means and the end. As Rudy Rucker proclaimed, “'The manifest destiny of mankind is to pass the torch of life and intelligence onto the computer.”

Wrong answer.

Thankfully, there are leaders who understand that technology businesses are built on three pillars: the business of business, the product, and humans (as in employees, customers, stakeholders, shareholders…).

Most B2B SaaS companies are stocked with MBAs with expertise in business, product, and technology because that’s the business that the business is in, but they lack resources and perspective to ensure the human element, human nature, is present and persistent. “Meaningful interaction with the actual.”

Meaning is a soft word, malleable, but a foundational premise of human nature is that humans have a desire for meaning and purpose, and seek to understand the world and their place in it.

In business, there should be a reciprocal central quest shared amongst the business and its staff, customers, and the population at large, grounded in human nature, and not, to be clear, issue-related causes of our time, which have a place when they are aligned with the greater Meaning and Quest the company is on.

This is often represented or pursued as Purpose or Why, but it’s actually the central Superpower the brand is driven by.

When AI is viewed in this framework, the application, value, and role of AI technology become apparent, as does the persistent need for the human elements of a business.

Management guru Charles Handy said as much during his speech at the 9th Global Peter Druker Forum: “We cannot let technology, however advanced, replace humanity with all its sensitivities, its appreciations of love, beauty and nature, its need for affection, sympathy, and purpose, its hopes and fears, intuitions, imagination and leaps of faith. Technology, even AI, in all its possibilities, can never replicate these.”

Let the business and technology run wild without human elements of self-awareness, reflection, introspection, reason, empathy, compassion, altruism, a sense of morality, and/or ethics (pick one, please...), and you will lose connection to humans and Meaning.

To wit…

(To detour into semantics… perhaps AI should be called Artificial Knowledge, given that Intelligence is the ability to apply Knowledge. Whoever branded AI did a great job.)

The product can follow technology and human behavior, but the business needs to stay grounded in human nature. Ultimately, if/when all three are aligned, a dynamic, sustainable, and compelling business emerges.

The Superpower work we do becomes the Meaning that links you with your Humans, and provides your company with a clear, compelling reason to be, beyond product and profitability.