🥸 Is “AI” actually McKinsey & Co in disguise?

PLUS: A sneak peek into the Facilitation Leadership Lab.

Hi there, and welcome back to Untangled, a newsletter and podcast about technology, people, and power. Here’s an exciting update: Kate Krontiris and I kicked off The Facilitation Leadership Lab last weekend with 20 participants. It’s a really incredible group — they are working to mitigate threats to voting, prevent forced labor and human trafficking, address the harms of the social web, advance social and economic justice in the U.S., and make Europe more democratic.

The first session overviewed five key skills:

1. Relational anchoring.

2. Identifying the core problem.

3. Identifying your gathering purpose.

4. Identifying ideal outcomes.

5. Agenda setting.

We have four more sessions to go, covering 20+ facilitation skills in total. In the future, I might use Untangled to share reflections on the course but for now, I wanted to offer a sneak peek. Kate and I developed a Skills Workbook of checklists, activities, reflection prompts, and practical information for course participants — here’s a snippet of the workbook, which features the skill, ‘identifying the core problem.’ Enjoy!

Now, on to the show.

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In my last essay, “What even is information?” I wrote about the problems of metaphors:

The problem with metaphors, though, is that over time, they become internalized as reality, as if we can remove the quotation marks around “learn” or “reason” and nothing is lost. But that’s not true — we lose quite a lot. The main thing we lose? ‘Why’ questions, and the pursuit of science. If information embodies rather than represents reality and if our brain is just an ‘information processor,’ well then, what else could we possibly need to know?

The point is, the metaphors we pick to describe technology matter a great deal. That’s why I was heartened last week to see Ted Chiang offer an alternative metaphor for artificial intelligence in The New Yorker: a management consulting firm like McKinsey & Company.

That might sound weird, so let me explain. Companies hire management consulting firms for all sorts of reasons — to help them cut costs, increase sales, develop strategies for new product areas, etc. Sometimes, though, these things are pretty terrible. Chiang highlights Purdue Pharma’s hiring of McKinsey to “turbocharge” the sales of OxyContin during the opioid epidemic. The point isn’t that management consulting firms are inherently bad actors. It is that they are “capital’s willing executioners” as one anonymous McKinsey employee put it. As Chiang explains:

Bosses have certain goals, but don’t want to be blamed for doing what’s necessary to achieve those goals; by hiring consultants, management can say that they were just following independent, expert advice.

Does that sound familiar? Right, you could ostensibly replace “by hiring consultants” with “by using algorithmic systems” and the sentence would still make sense. That’s Chiang’s point.

What I like about the metaphor is that it makes two things visible.