A small group of people will shape how AI lands on the rest of us. They are some of the most technically brilliant minds of their generation. As leaders and communicators, a striking number of them are appalling.
The All In podcast spent a chunk of a recent episode on this, and it was hard to disagree. The Cloudflare memo that announced job cuts by sorting people into a category called measurers, then declared the measurers no longer needed. The cold, faintly dystopian tone of the latest round of Meta cuts. The instinct on the show was that this is a PR problem, fixable by better comms people. That lets them off far too lightly.
Weak language hides weak logic
I have always thought weak language hides weak logic. Reduce a human being to a label like measurer and you are not picking a poor word. You are revealing how you actually see the people who work for you. The memo did not misrepresent the thinking. It exposed it.
We excuse this far too easily. Someone builds something extraordinary, so we assume the leadership and the judgement must follow. They do not. Designing a brilliant system and leading people through its consequences are completely different skills. Brilliance at the first earns no credit at the second, however much we keep handing it out.
Confirming the fear
And it matters more now than it ever has. There is already a deep, inherited suspicion of a small group holding knowledge and power the rest of us do not have. We have carried that unease since the nuclear age. So when the very people who hold that power describe human beings as measurers, or treat thousands of livelihoods as a line in a memo, they are not just being clumsy.
They are confirming the fear. They are building the backlash themselves.
Leadership and language are the job now
The brilliance got them this far. It will not carry them through what comes next. Leadership and language are not soft extras to delegate to a comms team and forget.
A lot of the most powerful people in technology are failing at it in plain sight, and they need to start treating that with the same seriousness they give the engineering.