Humanity vs People
If you’ve worked in or around big tech for any length of time, you’ve met the type, probably several dozen of them. They’re everywhere in AI. They care enormously about Humanity. They’d do anything for Humanity. They just can’t be bothered with actual people
Prosser strikes at the heart of how CEO's talk. Not just about AI, but across the spectrum.
For those who haven’t read writer Alan Moore and illustrator Dave Gibbons’ “Watchmen”, here’s the quick version: Jon Osterman is a nuclear physicist who gets disintegrated in a lab accident and reconstitutes himself as a being of godlike power. [...] And over the arc of the story, he gradually loses the ability to give a shit about people.
This isn’t a flaw in his character. Moore wrote it as the inevitable consequence of operating at that altitude. [...]
The crucial part is that Osterman doesn’t experience this as a loss, but as clarity. He thinks he’s seeing more clearly than everyone else. The people around him can tell that something essential has been lost, but he can’t see it himself because the view from orbit is so intoxicating.
Prosser's only applies this to "AI executives", but as far as I can tell this applies to almost all "Ultra High Net Worth Individuals".
Prosser makes a persuasive case for how AI focused companies should pivot their PR.
Jobs rarely talked about ‘Humanity’ as an abstraction or a project to be managed. He almost never spoke about the ‘trajectory of the species’ in his product launches. Instead, he talked about you. Your pocket. Your music. Your photos. What you create with this thing. The entire Apple communications architecture was built around the second person singular.
When Jobs introduced the iPod, he didn’t say, “This device represents a paradigm shift in humanity’s relationship with media.” He said, “A thousand songs in your pocket.” When he launched the iPhone, he didn’t claim it would transform the trajectory of civilization. He showed you what you could do with it
But the problem is that Prosser has identified the wrong problem.
Prosser thinks this is a communications problem. It's not. Nilay Patel identified that in his essay entitled Software Brain
You can’t advertise people out of reacting to their own experiences. [...]
You can't comms your way out of it either.