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At least three-quarters of the speaking invitations I get these days are about AI. But lately, theyre for different reasons. Companies used to bring me in under the assumption that artificial intelligence was going to change everything. So theyd ask me to talk about the jobless future, prompt engineering, or automating marketing online. Today, theyre asking a different kind of question: What went wrong? Where are the promised productivity gains? In other words, why isnt AI helping our company do stuff? And if I were to answer honestly, Id tell them the simple truth: Its because you and your people dont know what you want to do with it! This is not a technology problem or even a people problem, but an organizational one. Most companies are trying to run 21st-century AI-enabled companies on 20th-century industrial age architectures. The goals and the values are simply not aligned. {"blockType":"mv-promo-block","data":{"imageDesktopUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/10\/adus-labs-16x9-1.png","imageMobileUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/10\/anduslabs.png","eyebrow":"","headline":"Get more insights from Douglas Rushkoff and Andus Labs.","dek":"Keep up to date on the latest trends on how AI is reshaping culture and business, through the critical lens of human agency.","subhed":"","description":"","ctaText":"Learn More","ctaUrl":"https:\/\/www.anduslabs.com\/perspectives","theme":{"bg":"#1a064b","text":"#ffffff","eyebrow":"#9aa2aa","subhed":"#ffffff","buttonBg":"#ffffff","buttonHoverBg":"#3b3f46","buttonText":"#000000"},"imageDesktopId":91420531,"imageMobileId":91420530,"shareable":false,"slug":""}} Weak returns The failure of AI to increase productivity isnt just cherry-picked anecdote or idle speculation. According to Microsofts own study, only 25% of AI initiatives achieved expected returns over the past three years. Computer scientist Gary Marcus has been writing about the hype and misplaced hope around large language models (LLMs) for just as long. But the problem here is not that AI cant do great stuff; its that organizations are not yet thinking in a human-first way about technology. Its what Chris Perry, my partner at Andus, calls the Human OS. Companies are trying to integrate AI into their existing workflows without considering the human systems that can not only utilize it, but also grow and improve with it. This means more than training workers on AI interfaces or running trials of AI-derived ads. It means remaking the very structure of your organization around these new opportunities. Its a transition less technologically focused than the term OS may imply. You dont reprogram your workforce around the needs of AI. Rather, you develop a different kind of workplace. Who thought up how a bank works, with a safe in the back and tellers behind special windows? It was a way of creating an interface between lenders and borrowers in a new economic system. Now it seems obvious. Or take the grocery store, with aisles, shopping carts, and cashiers. It is an operating system designed to allow humans to browse, gather, purchase, or even socialize (in the fruit section). These are architectures for human interaction under capitalism and then industrial production. And they worked, largely because the people designing them were taking the human consumers into mind. Lessons from the Industrial Age We dont generally devise our operating systems for labor with the same considerations for the people trying to function within them. Industrial age values of efficiency and productivity led to the assembly line, the sweatshop, and the typing pool. These are environments in which humans are cogs in a machine, and the more repeatable and uniform their tasks, the better. If anything, the values of the industrial age were to remove human beings from the value equation altogether. Assembly lines allowed for unskilled, replaceable workers to replace higher-paid craftspeople. New machines were always valued for their ability to replace labor, or at least allow labor to be outsourced to less expensive labor in Asia. This approach to new technology wont work in the age of AI. And even talking this way will make workers less likely to consider the possibility that you are trying to do anything other than replace them with this stuff. You are trying to augment instead of replace them, right? I sure hope so, because the alternativea world where you are using AIs instead of peoplemeans your only competitive advantage is the size of your contract with the AI company. Moving from “more to better” Assuming you are on Team Human here, then the object of the game is to help your people come to terms with how their own capabilities can be enhanced with this stuff. Sure, they can churn out more PowerPoints or spreadsheets in an hour, but thats not the enhancement on offer here. The possibility is for them to do categorically better, more considered, and more developed work. Instead of using AI to create more volume of what already is (industrial age efficiency), what about using it to help imagine what does not yet exist? Again, this is the opposite of industrial age repeatability and workforce reduction. We have that one down. Its time to move on from more to better. But to do that, your company needs to retrieve its core competencies, rediscover its values, and reclaim its culture. Oddly enough, this is the real AI opportunity: to double down on the human creativity driving your enterprise. Its the very opposite of what weve been doing with technology until recently. But this means building a different kind of human readiness into the very architecture of your organization. You can buy a bunch of AI capabilities, but you need to match them with human processes that can benefit from them in real and sustainable ways over time. It will take more than one article to explain how that works, because it covers everything from talent development and workflows to rituals and incentives. For now, think of it this way: Machines process data fast and accurately. Humans dont process so much as respirate and metabolize. In a successful organization, these two functionsprocessing and metabolizingcan support each other. The way to get there is not simply to buy more AI capability and work on training, but to engage with your people in a way in which they know what they want to do better. They must understand that their nervous systems and sensibilities are going to be valued and trusted as they explore uncharted territory, and that their explorations are being integrated into the companys institutional memorywhatever their apparent contribution to growth or efficiency. {"blockType":"mv-promo-block","data":{"imageDesktopUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/10\/adus-labs-16x9-1.png","imageMobileUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/10\/anduslabs.png","eyebrow":"","headline":"Get more isights from Douglas Rushkoff and Andus Labs.","dek":"Keep up to date on the latest trends on how AI is reshaping culture and business, through the critical lens of human agency.","subhed":"","description":"","ctaText":"Learn More","ctaUrl":"https:\/\/www.anduslabs.com\/perspectives","theme":{"bg":"#1a064b","text":"#ffffff","eyebrow":"#9aa2aa","subhed":"#ffffff","buttonBg":"#ffffff","buttonHoverBg":"#3b3f46","buttonText":"#000000"},"imageDesktopId":91420531,"imageMobileId":91420530,"shareable":false,"slug":""}}
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E-Commerce
The darkness that swept over the Venezuelan capital in the predawn hours of Jan. 3, 2026, signaled a profound shift in the nature of modern conflict: the convergence of physical and cyber warfare. While U.S. special operations forces carried out the dramatic seizure of Venezuelan President Nicolįs Maduro, a far quieter but equally devastating offensive was taking place in the unseen digital networks that help operate Caracas. The blackout was not the result of bombed transmission towers or severed power lines but rather a precise and invisible manipulation of the industrial control systems that manage the flow of electricity. This synchronization of traditional military action with advanced cyber warfare represents a new chapter in international conflict, one where lines of computer code that manipulate critical infrastructure are among the most potent weapons. To understand how a nation can turn an adversarys lights out without firing a shot, you have to look inside the controllers that regulate modern infrastructure. They are the digital brains responsible for opening valves, spinning turbines, and routing power. For decades, controller devices were considered simple and isolated. Grid modernization, however, has transformed them into sophisticated internet-connected computers. As a cybersecurity researcher, I track how advanced cyber forces exploit this modernization by using digital techniques to control the machinerys physical behavior. Hijacked machines My colleagues and I have demonstrated how malware can compromise a controller to create a split reality. The malware intercepts legitimate commands sent by grid operators and replaces them with malicious instructions designed to destabilize the system. For example, malware could send commands to rapidly open and close circuit breakers, a technique known as flapping. This action can physically damage massive transformers or generators by causing them to overheat or go out of sync with the grid. These actions can cause fires or explosions that take months to repair. Simultaneously, the malware calculates what the sensor readings should look like if the grid were operating normally and feeds these fabricated values back to the control room. The operators likely see green lights and stable voltage readings on their screens even as transformers are overloading and breakers are tripping in the physical world. This decoupling of the digital image from physical reality leaves defenders blind, unable to diagnose or respond to the failure until it is too late. Historical examples of this kind of attack include the Stuxnet malware that targeted Iranian nuclear enrichment plants. The malware destroyed centrifuges in 2009 by causing them to spin at dangerous speeds while feeding false normal data to operators. Another example is the Industroyer attack by Russia against Ukraines energy sector in 2016. Industroyer malware targeted Ukraines power grid, using the grids own industrial communication protocols to directly open circuit breakers and cut power to Kyiv. More recently, the Volt Typhoon attack by China against the United States critical infrastructure, exposed in 2023, was a campaign focused on pre-positioning. Unlike traditional sabotage, these hackers infiltrated networks to remain dormant and undetected, gaining the ability to disrupt the United States communications and power systems during a future crisis. To defend against these types of attacks, the U.S. militarys Cyber Command has adopted a defend forward strategy, actively hunting for threats in foreign networks before they reach U.S. soil. Domestically, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency promotes secure by design principles, urging manufacturers to eliminate default passwords and utilities to implement zero trust architectures that assume networks are already compromised. Supply chain vulnerability Nowadays, there is a vulnerability lurking within the supply chain of the controllers themselves. A dissection of firmware from major international vendors reveals a significant reliance on third-party software components to support modern features such as encryption and cloud connectivity. This modernization comes at a cost. Many of these critical devices run on outdated software libraries, some of which are years past their end-of-life support, meaning theyre no longer supported by the manufacturer. This creates a shared fragility across the industry. A vulnerability in a single, ubiquitous library like OpenSSLan open-source software tool kit used worldwide by nearly every web server and connected device to encrypt communicationscan expose controllers from multiple manufacturers to the same method of attack. Modern controllers have become web-enabled devices that often host their own administrative websites. These embedded web servers present an often overlooked point of entry for adversaries. Attackers can infect the web application of a controller, allowing the malware to execute within the web browser of any engineer or operator who logs in to manage the plant. This execution enables malicious code to piggyback on legitimate user sessions, bypassing firewalls and issuing commands to the physical machinery without requiring the devices password to be cracked. The scale of this vulnerability is vast, and the potential for damage extends far beyond the power grid, including transportation, manufacturing, and water treatment systems. Using automated scanning tools, my colleagues and I have discovered that the number of industrial controllers exposed to the public internet is significantly higher than industry estimates suggest. Thousands of critical devices, from hospital equipment to substation relays, are visible to anyone with the right search criteria. This exposure provides a rich hunting ground for adversaries to conduct reconnaissance and identify vulnerable targets that serve as etry points into deeper, more protected networks. The success of recent U.S. cyber operations forces a difficult conversation about the vulnerability of the United States. The uncomfortable truth is that the American power grid relies on the same technologies, protocols, and supply chains as the systems compromised abroad. The U.S. power grid is vulnerable to hackers. Regulatory misalignment The domestic risk, however, is compounded by regulatory frameworks that struggle to address the realities of the grid. A comprehensive investigation into the U.S. electric power sector that my colleagues and I conducted revealed significant misalignment between compliance with regulations and actual security. Our study found that while regulations establish a baseline, they often foster a checklist mentality. Utilities are burdened with excessive documentation requirements that divert resources away from effective security measures. This regulatory lag is particularly concerning, given the rapid evolution of the technologies that connect customers to the power grid. The widespread adoption of distributed energy resources, such as residential solar inverters, has created a large, decentralized vulnerability that current regulations barely touch. Analysis supported by the Department of Energy has shown that these devices are often insecure. By compromising a relatively small percentage of these inverters, my colleagues and I found that an attacker could manipulate their power output to cause severe instabilities across the distribution network. Unlike centralized power plants protected by guards and security systems, these devices sit in private homes and businesses. Accounting for the physical Defending American infrastructure requires moving beyond the compliance checklists that currently dominate the industry. Defense strategies now require a level of sophistication that matches the attacks. This implies a fundamental shift toward security measures that take into account how attackers could manipulate physical machinery. The integration of internet-connected computers into power grids, factories, and transportation networks is creating a world where the line between code and physical destruction is irrevocably blurred. Ensuring the resilience of critical infrastructure requires accepting this new reality and building defenses that verify every component, rather than unquestioningly trusting the software and hardwareor the green lights on a control panel. Saman Zonouz is an associate professor of cybersecurity and privacy and electrical and computer engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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E-Commerce
Two in five Americans have fought with a family member about politics, according to a 2024 study by the American Psychiatric Association. One in five have become estranged over controversial issues, and the same percentage has blocked a family member on social media or skipped a family event due to disagreements. Difficulty working through conflict with those close to us can cause irreparable harm to families and relationships. Whats more, the inability to heal these relationships can be detrimental to physical and emotional well-being, and even longevity. Healing relationships often involve forgivenessand sometimes we have the ability to truly reconcile. But as a professor and licensed professional counselor who researches forgiveness, I believe the process is often misunderstood. In my 2021 book, Practicing Forgiveness: A Path Toward Healing, I talk about how we often feel pressure to forgive and that forgiveness can feel like a moral mandate. Consider 18th-century poet Alexander Popes famous phrase: To err is human; to forgive, divineas though doing so makes us better people. The reality is that reconciling a relationship is not just difficult, but sometimes inadvisable or dangerous, especially in cases involving harm or trauma. I often remind people that forgiveness does not have to mean a reconciliation. At its core, forgiveness is internal: a way of laying down ill will and our emotional burden, so we can heal. It should be seen as a separate process from reconciliation, and deciding whether to renegotiate a relationship. But either form of forgiveness is difficultand here may be some insights as to why. Forgiveness, karma, and revenge In 2025, I conducted a study with my colleagues Alex Hodges and Jason Vannest to explore emotions people may experience around forgiveness, and how those emotions differ from when they experience karma or revenge. We defined forgiveness as relinquishing feelings of ill will toward someone who engaged in a harmful action or behavior toward you. Karma refers to a situation where someone who wronged you got what they deserved without any action from you. Revenge, on the other hand, happens when you retaliate. First, we prompted participants to share memories of three events related to offering forgiveness, witnessing karma and taking revenge. After sharing each event, they completed a questionnaire indicating what emotions they experienced as they retold their story. We found that most people say they aspire to forgive the person who hurt them. To be specific, participants were about 1.5 times more likely to desire forgiveness than karma or revenge. Most admitted, though, that karma made them happier than offering forgiveness. Working toward forgiveness tended to make people sad and anxious. In fact, participants were about 1.5 times more likely to experience sadness during forgiveness than during karma or revenge. Pursuing forgiveness was more stressful, and harder work, because it forces people to confront feelings that may often be perceived as negative, such as stress, anger, or sadness. Two different processes Forgiveness is also confusing, thanks to the way it is typically conflated with reconciliation. Forgiveness researchers tie reconciliation to interpersonal forgiveness, in which the relationship is renegotiated or even healed. However, at times, reconciliation should not occurperhaps due to a toxic or unsafe relationship. Other times, it simply cannot occur, such as when the offender has died or is a stranger. But not all forgiveness depends on whether a broken relationship has been repaired. Even when reconciliation is impossible, we can still relinquish feelings of ill will toward an offender, engaging in intrapersonal forgiveness. Not all forgiveness has to involve renegotiating a relationship with the person who hurt you. I used to practice counseling in a hospitals adolescent unit, in which all the teens I worked with were considered a danger to themselves or others. Many of them had suffered abuse. When I pictured what success could look like for them, I hoped that, in adulthood, my clients would not be focused on their past traumathat they could experience safety, health, belonging, and peace. Most often, such an outcome was not dependent upon reconciling with the offender. In fact, reconciliation was often ill-advised, especially if offenders had not expressed remorse or commitment to any type of meaningful change. Even if they had, there are times when the victim chooses not to renegotiate the relationship, especially when working through trauma. Still, working toward intrapersonal forgiveness could help some of these young people begin each day without the burden of trauma, anger, and fear. In effect, the client could say, What I wanted from this person I did not get, and I no longer expect it. Removing expectations from people by identifying that we are not likely to get what we want can ease the burden of past transgressions. Eventually, you decide whether to continue to expend the emotional energy it takes to stay angry with someone. Relinquishing feelings of ill will toward someone who has caused you harm can be difficult. It may require patience, time, and hard work. When we recognize that we are not going to get what we wanted from someonetrust, safety, loveit can feel a lot like grief. Someone may pass through the same stages, including denial, anger, bargaining, and depression, before they can accept and forgive within themselves, without the burden of reconciliation. Taking stock With this in mind, I offer four steps to evaluate where you are on your forgiveness journey. A simple tool I developed, the Forgiveness Reconciliation Inventory, looks at each of these steps in more depth. Talk to someone. You can talk to a friend, mentor, counselor, grandmasomeone you trust. Talking makes the unmentionable mentionable. It can reduce pain and help you gain perspective on the person or event that left you hurt. Examine if reconciliation is beneficial. Sometimes there are benefits to reconciliation. Broken relationships can be heald, and even strengthened. This is especially more likely when the offender expresses remorse and changes behaviorsomething the victim has no control over. In some cases, however, there are no benefits, or the benefits are outweighed by the offenders lack of remorse and change. In this case, you might have to come to terms with processing an emotionalor even tangibledebt that will not be repaid. Consider your feelings toward the offender, the benefits and consequences of reconciliation, and whether theyve shown any remorse and change. If you want to forgive them, determine whether it will be interpersonaltalking to them and trying to renegotiate the relationshipor intrapersonalin which you reconcile your feelings and expectations within yourself. Either way, forgiveness comes when we relinquish feelings of ill will toward another. Richard Balkin is a distinguished professor of counselor education at the University of Mississippi. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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