Currents And Tides: The AI Doom Cycle
Currents & Tides — Episode 2
AI Doom Panic abounds…
Technologists, journalists, politicians and podcast experts are all exhorting—maybe, extorting?—us to fear artificial intelligence.
You’ve heard the predictions:
Jobs will disappear! Nobody will think anymore! Creative work will become meaningless! Higher education will collapse!
Businesses will eliminate entire departments! Human beings will become hopelessly dependent on machines!
Oh—
And The Children! Will Somebody Save The Children!
And, depending on who is delivering the prediction, there is usually some combination of followers, likes, attention, funding—or regulation—to be gained from telling you exactly how terrifying the future is going to be.
But…
Does anyone, no matter their expertise, really know how AI will influence our future lives?
As a child of the 80s and 90s, I remember another magical technological threshold:
The Great Internet Panic.
There were the techno-optimists who promised the World Wide Web would connect humanity, decentralize knowledge, democratize information and allow anyone with a cheap computer—or access to one at the library—to smarten their minds.
Then there were the doomers…
And I betcha know how this went, right?
Nobody would read anymore! Libraries would disappear! Publishers would collapse!
Children would become zombies!
(Save The Children! Wouldn’t Somebody Please Save The Children!)
Institutional gatekeepers would become irrelevant! Information would be everywhere!
And society would inevitably descend into some technologically induced version of cultural serfdom!
Sound familiar?
The Internet did, of course, change nearly everything.
But not quite in the ways either side predicted.
It destroyed some industries while creating entirely new markets—and entirely new industries.
It changed how we research, communicate, shop, work, date, argue, learn and waste enormous amounts of our earthly time.
Yes, it did weaken gatekeepers while creating entirely new ones. But it also gave ordinary people access to information that once required libraries, experts or institutional permission.
And somewhere along the way, the strange thing everybody feared simply became…
Normal.
Part of everyday human life.
I remember one particularly absurd example from that Great Internet Panic era:
Around 2000, while attending The Small, Expensive Liberal Arts College, I was writing an English literature paper premised on a strange thesis.
And after some Internet surfing—capital-I Internet, because that was still a thing—I found someone who shared my strange thesis.
On a…blog!
Except the writer wasn’t some anonymous early-Internet conspiracy theorist ranting about Star Trek and Illuminati symbolism.
Nope!
This writer was a Harvard literature professor.
So I quoted him. Cited the blog. Included the URL and then emailed the information to my professor.
Once my professor received my email and printed essay, what followed was a prolonged, absurdist argument about whether a blog could be considered authoritative.
Could we, as mere academics, accept an Internet source as trusted? Could we trust the personal blog of the supposed Harvard professor? Was that Harvard professor actually the real Harvard professor?
And!
Could the photograph, credentials, Harvard directory listing and institutional page themselves somehow be fabricated?
This argument went on until I finally made a snide Jacques Derrida joke and my professor angrily responded:
“I know Deconstructionist Theory! And I know the Harvard professor! We’re old friends!”
Yup. That was the era.
And here we are again with a different technology.
The promises? Not really that different.
And yet…
The panic feels strangely familiar, with the same mixture of optimism, fear, generational resistance, professional anxiety, witch hunts and purity tests we saw in that earlier era.
I mean, as I’m sure you’ve read, heard or rolled your eyes while doom scrolling:
Everything on the Internet is AI-generated! Nothing can be trusted!
Only awkward, misspelled sentences are proof of human authorship! Every gleaming, articulate sentence is evidence of AI contamination!
And for founders, owners and small teams, that question of trust becomes much more…practical.
Can you trust what your team is producing?
And beneath that question is a more realistic one:
Does anyone really know where AI is going? How it will evolve? How it will transform culture? Human communication?
Art? Commerce?
Business structures?
Probably not.
Because technology rarely develops according to predictions made during its opening phase. Instead, it evolves, mutates, gets absorbed into everyday life and eventually changes things nobody thought to predict.
Which is why founders and owners cannot become trapped inside the daily swirl of AI prophecy.
Instead, you have to…
Prepare.
Step back from the business and look at your operations, your processes, your people and your software stack…
And ask:
Where is AI already beginning to compress work? Which systems or roles are vulnerable to consolidation?
Where does institutional knowledge currently live?
Which people are resisting? Which are adapting?
Who becomes more creative when the processes that were stymying them are removed? Who is becoming capable of moving across functions, systems and disciplines?
Who is becoming your Hybrid Operator?
Because AI will continue to evolve.
And some of us will respond to that evolution with agility and realism.
While others will respond with…
Fear.
While others will chase every new tool and prediction.
And some businesses will quietly begin experimenting, rearranging and restructuring themselves around what the technology now provides and…
Its future possibilities.
For founders, owners and entrepreneurs:
If you don’t adapt…
Your competition will.
And…
That’s when your business may die.
Slowly.
And then all at once.