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The original article in Linked In.
Someone in your company is already telling you how they will behave when the next big technology shift lands, and they are doing it in public. We explore a sharply argued idea: your team’s AI discourse functions like a corporate MRI, exposing who can handle nuance, who defaults to panic, and who will try to slow everyone else down with “reasonable” sounding objections that collapse under scrutiny.
We break down the recurring pattern the author calls out, from not understanding AI tools, to refusing to learn them, to attacking colleagues who adopt them, to demanding policies that freeze progress. Along the way, we compare today’s generative AI anxiety to past waves of workplace hysteria around tools like Word, Photoshop, synthesizers, calculators, and the internet, not to minimize the moment, but to highlight how predictable the human response can be during digital transformation and organizational change.
Then we get painfully practical: the “AI Karen” meeting, the month-by-month death spiral where endless debate hands competitors a structural advantage, and a real-world example from the music industry where platforms police which tools creators used instead of judging the finished work. We also draw a bright line between meme-level fear and legitimate AI governance concerns like copyright, privacy, bias, environmental impact, and responsible use, with a simple demand: bring evidence, not ghost stories.
If you lead a team, build a product, or shape corporate strategy, this is a gut-check on what you reward, what you tolerate, and what you accidentally institutionalise. Subscribe, share this with a manager, and leave a review with your take: what should matter more at work, the tool or the results?
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