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…and wouldn’t you already know?

By Ed Goldman

Since 2025 starts in 48 hours or less, depending on when you click open this column, maybe we ought to close out 2024 considering whether Artificial Intelligence can determine if our bosses are “all there” or what we might call a bullet-point shy of an executive summary.

A-I developers are pushing cognitive testing both for CEOs and politicians flying very close to the sun (i.e., running for very high offices). But as in all classical tragedies, their focus is only on the elite, assuming that we, the people, will watch their dramas play out and feel a cathartic release as we exit the theatre—as in, “Man, that King Lear was bananas! Good thing we peasants have no money or future, huh?”

All of us have worked for bosses we thought might be clinically, criminally or comically insane. A few decades ago I worked for the multi-millionaire publisher of a weekly newspaper in Southern California who, wanting to “reward” me for my work as his editor, insisted on taking me to lunch. Visions of champagne, manly steaks served rare and menus (rather than waitresses) with tassels on them filled my feverish 24-year-old mind.  

Instead, my boss and I piled into his Rolls Royce and went to a McDonald’s drive-thru. Then, while garbage-gobbling in transit, he invited me to spend another hour with him to help with “a business decision.” I thought it would involve acquiring other media properties like a radio station or another community newspaper and quickly scanned my brain to summon up what I knew of current listener and reader demographics, trends and potential pitfalls. 

But no. He drove us to a used-plumbing warehouse to examine the available toilets, from which he’d select a dozen to buy for one of his rental properties. “You have a good eye for color,” he said, as we eyed the pastel potties (the crappers of choice in the no-taste 1970s). 

At one point he saw that I was smirking even though I believed my beard hid gestures like that. He wondered what I found amusing. “Well, I kind of thought when you asked me to lunch that–” I started to say. But he cut me off. “That I’d ask you to buy your own burger? No, no, no. This was my treat! You’re worth it!” 

I didn’t bother to bring up my assisting him with making a business decision, as he’d claimed to be seeking. Even Alice was too polite to ask what the hell was going on in Wonderland as things grew “curiouser and curiouser.”

While he might not have been one of the C-Suite types being targeted by A-I cognitive testing, he did run a very small fiefdom: a weekly community newspaper and a real estate brokerage. 

But what about the “little people,” the so-called “hoi polloi” (even though some people think that means A-listers whereas it refers instead to the general public or even the lower classes­)? Aren’t they just as capable of cognitive dissidence as the one-percenters? And maybe even more entitled to it. Why aren’t A-I swamis running loony-quotient tests on the following three job titles?

1. HOME CONTRACTOR. Don’t you think someone who tells you your job will cost a certain amount of money and be completed by a certain date, both of which turn out to be hilariously untrue, is possibly…delusional? (On the other hand, if we believed the spiel, perhaps we’rethe ones in need of psychological assessment.)