San Jose -
Tech bros just don’t get it. They never will. Their messaging often reveals their true selves, which can be inimical to living and working in a decent society.
Take the Zendesk billboard on the Embarcadero (pictured below) outside my San Francisco hotel room. Their specialized AI agents are purported to be “all work, no watercooler.”
The implication in the message is that human beings waste too much time being, well, human. It’s otherwise all non-stop work for their non-human slaves. After all, who needs humans wasting time at the watercooler, though watercoolers are admittedly hard to kibbitz around on Zoom in our remote-work world.
Zendesk completely misses the point on how humans build and sustain relationships, earn trust, exchange ideas, co-create, engage in personal follow-up and accountability that’s often lacking in organizations, build emotional intelligence, and otherwise enjoy human-centered work. So many productive ideas, innovations, and communications started at watercoolers in the past or their social equivalents such as cafeterias, parking lots, company gyms, or a nearby bar.
There’s no question that tech bros have stratospheric IQs to go along with their megalomania and cunning and, in the dramatist Edward Moore’s words (“The Gamester” 1753) the power that comes with being “rich beyond the dreams of avarice.” Their downfall and, potentially, that of civilization itself will owe much more to their frightening lack of EQ, their hubris, and their indifference to the human condition.
Now let’s be fair to Zendesk. They have some brilliant men (and women) whose messaging in other ads does show some regard for their fellow human beings. This ad just misses the mark, however.
Of course, AI is impossible without IQ. Understanding and managing its impact on society with human-centered moral clarity, however, is equally impossible without EQ. And most tech bros lack EQ and even hold talk about it in great disdain.
