Hi, it’s Charley, and this is Untangled, a newsletter about technology, people, and power.
If you care about how technology shapes society, one of the most important skills you can learn isn’t computer science, engineering, or product development — it’s facilitative leadership. The work of building a better world starts by building working environments that:
Cultivate shared meaning around the content of their work.
Make productive use of difference and conflict.
Focus on the real challenge at hand.
Make meaningful progress toward achieving their goals.
Offers a sense of belonging to all team members.
Yes, technical skills matter. But deeply relational skills — reframing and reflecting, identifying an organization’s core challenge, navigating conflict, etc. — help facilitate organizational change, and build better worlds. If you want to learn these and other skills, my colleague Kate Krontiris and I just launched the next cohort of the Facilitation Leadership Lab.
On to the show!
Last week, I wrote AI, uncertainty, and the production of ignorance. Today, I’m sharing my conversation with
, the journalist and host of , a funny and provocative new podcast about “things that are not what they seem.” Evan cloned his voice, hitched it to an AI agent, and then put it in conversation with scammers and spammers, a therapist, work colleagues, and even his friends and family. Shell Game helps listeners see a li’l further into a future overrun with AI agents and helps answer the question: what might it look and feel like to live in a world of synthetic people?Evan and I talk about:
What happens when Evan’s AI agent engages with scammers and spammers — it’s both weird and funny.
The harrowing experience of listening to your AI agent make stuff up about you in therapy.
How those building these tools view the problem(s) they’re solving.
What it’s like to send your AI agent to work meetings in your place.
The work required to maintain these tools and make their outputs useful (Hint — they don’t exactly save you time or make you more efficient)
Why several of Evan’s friends and family members remain disturbed by their interactions with his AI agent to this day.
Enjoy the conversation? Share it with a friend and then listen to
!Okay, that’s it for now,
Charley
A world overrun by AI agents w/Evan Ratliff