1 week ago
13
I’m going to make a claim that may sound a little nuts on its face: paranoia is healthy in business.
Not anxiety. Not doom. Not “sell everything, move to the beach, and wait for the robots to finish us off.” I mean paranoia in the sense of assuming something out there can hurt you and spending real time figuring out what it is, how it might unfold, and what you’re going to do about it.
That kind of paranoia has kept my companies alive. The other kind almost broke me.
When people ask how I think about AI, I start there. You should be paranoid about AI—not because “we’re all dead in three to five years,” but because AI is exactly the kind of technology trend that can make what you do irrelevant if you’re asleep at the wheel.
Paranoia is seeing the headlines and asking, “What are the possible outcomes? Which ones can hurt us? How fast? And how can I influence those outcomes?” Anxiety is reading the same headlines and jumping straight to, “It’s all over, nothing I do matters,” and then letting that story run your life.
I’ve lived both.
English (US) ·