Rule #1: Don’t Make Them Think

Another diatribe about why executives need the “workers” to be real people, not AI agents

I recently ran across an allegedly suppressed top-secret video of the ex-CEO of Google talking about AI and how it’s going to transform software development—and all Tech—in the next two years. It was shocking and appalling and all the awful feels to listen to this man and his dreams for how a lowly CEO wouldn’t even need product development staff anymore, because AI agents would do it all. “They’ll happily do what my own engineers argue with me about.”

I watched about 10 minutes of his laying out the future for us useless tech folk before I was too depressed to go on and went back to trying to make my Henning Family Cookbook database easy enough for my Henning family to use. I’d been working on that problem for about a week and a half, and every time I got to the “surely this is something that will be intuitive enough so that people will just type in their recipes and then we’ll have a cookbook” my mother would call me with another thing that bewildered and blocked her.

Anyone that tells me the Mom Test isn’t valid usability testing doesn’t know my mom.

So, while trying to get ChatGPT to explain how to customize the Wordpress code so that the Airtable iframe wouldn’t add it’s own scroll bar (thus having two scroll bars, which confused people) I realized the big mistake in that xCEO’s reasoning. He thinks most people can do stuff. He thinks that most people will take the time to figure stuff out. He is wrong. They can’t and they won’t. Most people are luddites, and they’re getting worse not better. AI can’t fix that.

The last generation that had to figure out technology were GenX and elder Millennials. Younger millennials, GenZ and now Gen Alpha are much, much worse at technology. They grew up with the tech we older folk invented, so they don’t know how it works under the hood. These folks are just as bad as your Silent Generation parents or grandparents when it comes to technology. They have expectations. Or as one executive told me at the dawn of website development, ”I just want it to turn on and work, like a TV.” Nobody cares about how it works, they want results. Don’t make them think.

This is a problem, now that everything is becoming enshitified and working worse and worse. Just like nobody these days can fix their own cars, nobody wants to use buggy software or spend their valuable attention on confusing websites. They’re not going to look at your crappy website and realize there are two scroll bars. There’s no time! They’re off to the next attention-demanding activity. Attention is our most valuable commodity now, and nobody is going to waste it on the xCEO’s crappy software.

Even if they would, most people—99.9%—are not “figure-it-out” people. And it’s figure-it-out people that are needed to make AI work. Even AI agents can’t help you if you don’t know what you don’t know.

I guarantee that xCEO isn’t a figure-it-out person, either. He’s not a maker, he’s a director. He’s a “you do it” magical thinker. He desperately wants to fire all the annoying engineers and PMs—and especially the damn designers—and just tell a robot what to do. But once he can do that (and I agree, that’s coming) he won’t know what to tell it. He won’t know how to adjust context so that he gets what he wants. More than that, he’ll be annoyed that he has to. He’ll be whiny and foot stomping and have to hire a product manager to help him because it won’t work like magic, which is all any non-maker really wants. A magic wand.

AI is not your magic wand.

You know why Google spends a fortune on CS folks to help executives use their DIY platforms? Because executives don’t want to use it. They want somebody else to do it for them. That is not going to change.

Good for the few remaining figure-it-outers, but scary as we all start to get old and dream of opening a pottery studio and leaving this insanity behind us. Gen Alpha will have to pick up the baton and start building things. They’re going to be in high demand, if they can figure out how to do that.

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