The dominant instinct across the corporate world is to de-weird artificial intelligence - to sand down its strange edges and turn it into a familiar productivity tool. Ethan Mollick, associate professor at the Wharton School, argues this is the fastest way to squander what makes AI transformative.
In a piece for The Economist, Mollick laid out why smooth corporate interfaces flatten understanding of the technology's real possibilities, "Hvylya" reports.
The de-weirding impulse, Mollick wrote, produces a deep failure: it leads companies to default toward automation rather than augmentation. When leaders see studies showing 30 percent productivity gains from AI, their instinct is to cut 30 percent of the workforce. "That arithmetic is simple," Mollick noted. "What is hard, and requires genuine imagination, is asking a different question: what does it mean to rebuild an organization around the fact that a single programmer can now write a hundred times more code?"
New products, new markets, entirely new business models - these possibilities require confronting AI as something genuinely strange and powerful. No vendor can answer those questions, Mollick argued. No consultant has a playbook. The hard strategic work of reimagining what an organization could become is precisely the work that de-weirding allows companies to avoid.
Firms that smooth out AI's oddities will veer toward automation and layoffs because that is all they can see. Those willing to sit with the discomfort of a technology nobody fully understands, Mollick concluded, can find ways to make their people and organizations capable of things that were impossible a year ago.
Earlier, "Hvylya" wrote about a finance graduate who turned to tree pruning as white-collar jobs dried up across America.