The Contrarian Digest [Week 21]
The Contrarian Digest is my weekly pick of LinkedIn posts I couldn’t ignore. Smart ideas, bold perspectives, and conversations worth having.
No algorithms, no hype… Just real ideas worth your time.
Let’s dive in [21st Edition] 👇
Original publication date — July 7, 2025 (HERE)
1️⃣ The Infrastructure of Infidelity – Ashima G.
⚡𝐈𝐧 𝐛𝐫𝐢𝐞𝐟: What if cheating isn’t really about morals anymore? Maybe it’s just what happens whenthe structures we live in are designed for convenience, not commitment.
🗞️𝐅𝐮𝐥𝐥 𝐩𝐨𝐬𝐭: https://lnkd.in/eyt5BMyV
2️⃣ Tech Prophets & Their Demons – Manuel Koelman 🏴☠️
⚡𝐈𝐧 𝐛𝐫𝐢𝐞𝐟: What happens when tech’s most influential minds can’t explain what they’re building toward? A bizarre interview with Peter Thiel reveals something unsettling.
🗞️𝐅𝐮𝐥𝐥 𝐩𝐨𝐬𝐭: https://lnkd.in/eX4vv-x3
3️⃣ The Consulting Smokescreen – Usman Sheikh
⚡𝐈𝐧 𝐛𝐫𝐢𝐞𝐟: OpenAI enters consulting. Revenue diversification or misdirection? While everyone watches the obvious move, the real game might be unfolding elsewhere.
🗞️𝐅𝐮𝐥𝐥 𝐩𝐨𝐬𝐭: https://lnkd.in/eFREtp9X
💭𝐌𝐲 𝐭𝐚𝐤𝐞: OpenAI’s bet: becoming civilization’s Operating System. A Neo-Empire in the making – https://lnkd.in/ezE2reC6
4️⃣ The Matrix Isn’t Sci-Fi Anymore. It’s a Subscription – Michael Hutchens
⚡𝐈𝐧 𝐛𝐫𝐢𝐞𝐟: Tech promises connection but delivers distraction. Are you waking up or choosing the easy escape? The blue pill is seductive.
🗞️𝐅𝐮𝐥𝐥 𝐩𝐨𝐬𝐭: https://lnkd.in/euSMY2RZ
💭𝐌𝐲 𝐭𝐚𝐤𝐞: How it all began – https://lnkd.in/ee3wRyNc
5️⃣ Corporate Circus: When Leaders Forget Who Employs Them – Jatin Modi
⚡𝐈𝐧 𝐛𝐫𝐢𝐞𝐟: Selling out your legacy to chase trends rarely pays off. Jaguar’s crash echoes New Coke’s cautionary tale about losing yourself.
🗞️𝐅𝐮𝐥𝐥 𝐩𝐨𝐬𝐭: https://lnkd.in/eNNZbxCm
6️⃣ Free Labor, Billion Dollar Exit – Grant Lee
⚡𝐈𝐧 𝐛𝐫𝐢𝐞𝐟: Luis von Ahn (Duolingo) built a $21B empire by convincing people to work for free… twice. Here’s how he weaponized “meaning” to replace payroll.
🗞️𝐅𝐮𝐥𝐥 𝐩𝐨𝐬𝐭: https://lnkd.in/ev7gBget
7️⃣ The Meeting Industrial Complex – Shashank Sharma
⚡𝐈𝐧 𝐛𝐫𝐢𝐞𝐟: What if most meetings aren’t about work at all? The hidden psychology behind the corporate time-wasting culture.
🗞️𝐅𝐮𝐥𝐥 𝐩𝐨𝐬𝐭: https://lnkd.in/ez9eZhnx
8️⃣ Predictable Human Algorithms – Roger Dooley
⚡𝐈𝐧 𝐛𝐫𝐢𝐞𝐟: If AI can predict your decisions before you make them (and “Centaur” just did), where’s the line between personalized service and manipulation?
🗞️𝐅𝐮𝐥𝐥 𝐩𝐨𝐬𝐭: https://lnkd.in/eaikpvvG
——-
Which of these topics resonates with you the most?
Share your thoughts in the comments!
To your success,
Gaetan Portaels
READ THE FULL POSTS BELOW (and please, don’t forget to follow the authors)
1️⃣ The Infrastructure of Infidelity – Ashima G
Infidelity has become a pandemic.
It wasn’t always the case.
Infidelity used to be rare because it was difficult. The cost of getting caught was high. The logistics were complex. Access was limited to people you knew, people in physical proximity, or people introduced through shared networks. The structure of society functioned as a constraint on behavior. That constraint has disappeared.
The root change is infrastructural. Infidelity, like most forms of deviance, follows opportunity. Dating apps are optimized for access. They turn proximity into irrelevance. They reduce discovery cost to zero. Every swipe is a probability function. Eventually, it converges.
Married people used to stop cheating because it became logistically or socially impossible. Now, there is no terminal condition. There is no end to new faces. No end to new excuses. The algorithm keeps feeding possibilities. The cost of trying again is negligible.
This is a shift in incentive surfaces. When platforms reward novelty and reward attention, they make monogamy look like an inefficient use of optionality. And optionality is what modern systems are built to maximize. That includes human relationships.
Infidelity isn’t rising because people have changed. It’s rising because the local maxima of effort versus reward has moved. The environment changed faster than the social institutions designed to contain it. And unlike in earlier eras, the system no longer applies brakes.
What we’re seeing now isn’t a moral collapse. It’s a feature of networked opportunity with no countervailing friction. Monogamy requires scarcity. Scarcity doesn’t exist anymore.
Sad.
2️⃣ Tech Prophets & Their Demons – Manuel Koelman
I finally came around to listening to the Peter Thiel interview with The New York Times.
It was – for the lack of a better word – bizarre.
In the first part, Peter Thiel painted a surreal picture of our technological future.
But the most revealing part wasn’t what he said about AI or politics. It was his meditation on the Antichrist.
In Thiel’s view, the Antichrist isn’t some power-hungry tech overlord. It’s someone who promises protection from technology. A Greta Thunberg-like figure, in his words, who uses our fears of AI catastrophe to justify global surveillance and authoritarian control.
The irony is hard to ignore. Thiel’s own company, Palantir Technologies, builds surveillance tools that could easily enable exactly this kind of authoritarian control. When Ross Douthat – the interviewer – pointed this out, Thiel offered vague talk about “different scenarios” but struggled to explain the contradiction.
This isn’t just about one eccentric billionaire. It reflects something deeper: a crisis of coherence in tech leadership. A generation of builders who want radical progress – but ignore its consequences. Who chase disruption – but can’t articulate what comes after.
Thiel clearly longs for a future that transcends human limits. He reminisced about the early PayPal days, when people held cryonics parties – freezing their bodies after death, hoping science would one day bring them back.
To me, this isn’t just nostalgia. It sounds like – and this is my interpretation – a deep fear of death. That may be why he dismisses much of today’s innovation as shallow or incremental. If it doesn’t help us cheat death, he seems to think, how much progress is it really?
At the same time, he makes fun of today’s version of transhumanism – the idea of using tech to go beyond human limits. He says it is not ambitious enough, not transformative enough. He wants more. But he can’t say what that “more” is. Or what it’s for.
And then comes one of the most bizarre moments: a long, uncomfortable pause when asked whether the human race should endure (it’s at 38:19 in the video in the comments).
This matters.
Because if even our most influential technologists are confused about the future they’re building – how are the rest of us supposed to make sense of it?
This is also a warning. Technical brilliance is not enough. We need moral clarity, meaningful goals, and a shared vision of what a good future looks like.
Otherwise, we risk building the very systems that undo us – while telling ourselves we’re saving the world.
Have you seen the interview? What do you think?
Here is the full interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vV7YgnPUxcU
3️⃣ The Consulting Smokescreen – Usman Sheikh
Now for this post from Usman Sheikh: The API business was never the endgame.
Workflow control is.
As 42% of U.S. businesses are now paying for AI, the market is shifting from novelty to necessity.
OpenAI sees what’s coming: foundation models will commoditize. One of their responses?
Launching a consulting division:
→ Adopting Palantir’s FDE playbook
→ $10M minimum commitments required
→ Embedding engineers directly inside companies
→ Securing control points before models commoditize
The surface story: diversifying revenue streams.
The real story: securing the only moat that matters when models become utilities. Owning the implementation and maintenance layer becomes key.
The NewCo strategy implemented:
Control Points: Once their engineers embed custom models into Pentagon war-planning or Grab’s mapping systems, switching becomes unthinkable. The API was bait. Workflow ownership is the trap.
Contextual Lock-in: Generic models are commodities. But FDEs who spend months learning Morgan Stanley’s compliance quirks create knowledge competitors can’t replicate. Every deployment deepens the moat.
Switching Costs: Traditional software has features. OpenAI aims to build dependencies so deep that removal means rebuilding core operations.
Three challenges threaten this strategy:
First, Palantir owns this playbook. Twenty years, hundreds of battle-tested FDEs, and deep government relationships create formidable barriers.
Second, Meta is recruiting their talent. Eight key researchers left while OpenAI tries to protect the core.
Third, they’re launching products across the entire tech stack: productivity tools, browsers, robots, devices. This expansion straining precious resources.
Doing research for this post made me wonder: Is the “War on Everything” deliberate misdirection?
While competitors scramble to copy their consulting model and defend against their product announcements, OpenAI’s core team races toward AGI.
Maybe workflow control isn’t the endgame. It’s the distraction that funds and masks the real pursuit: superintelligence.
For consulting leaders watching this unfold: The race isn’t for better AI models or more consultants. It’s for who locks down workflow control first.
Traditional firms bill hours. Tech firms sell licenses.
But the winners will own the implementation layer, embedded deeply making removal a costly decision.
The lines between consulting and software firms will blur and the winners will deliver outcomes consistently.
On the flip side, while everyone debates whether OpenAI can beat Palantir at their own game, they might be playing an entirely different one.
Because if the consulting push is misdirection, then the real disruption hasn’t even started yet.
Gaetan Portaels’ take:
Great analysis, Usman. But I can’t help feeling this underestimates the scale of the play.
OpenAI isn’t just building “workflow control,” but REALITY INFRASTRUCTURE. Control itself.
I think the real game is UBIQUITY: Every wearable, IoT device, decision point becomes an OpenAI node. It’s not about market share, but human interface monopoly.
I’m convinced this is a 3-pronged Ubiquity Strategy:
1️⃣ Bottom-up via CONSUMER addiction.
2️⃣ Top-down through ENTERPRISE lock-in, cascading from corporates to SMBs.
→ FDE playbook is phase 1.
→ NEXT might be an Integration Partner Model—the Odoo playbook—where armies of 3rd-party providers embed OpenAI flows deep in SMB operations.
3️⃣ Lateral: Full integration with government infrastructures worldwide. Not just digitizing workflows, but embedding into ALL critical systems governments manage or enforce.
Once consumer & enterprise adoption becomes unstoppable, the next frontier is becoming the backbone of global state power. But hey, when the story is “more control,” do governements even need outside pressure?
Consulting isn’t misdirection. Just one trojan horse in their gamble to become civilization’s Operating System. A neo-Empire in the making.
Just my ray of sunshine two cents 😉
Usman’s reply:
Lots to think about Gaetan. They are laying the groundwork for this ubiquitous takeover. Meta’s strong reaction could also be a reaction to seeing this and blocking it by chipping away at the core asset: talent.
Microsoft also is playing hardball by having negotiated a great contract with them and are ensuring they own a piece of this company or at least the blueprints before they hit escape velocity.
Couple that with Ilya launching SSI and focusing solely on the superintelligence goal and you have multiple players who strongly believe in the narrative that the first company to unlock superintelligence gets a massive advantage.
Its a fascinating space to be covering and every piece has me going deep on multiple rabbit holes.
Gaetan Portaels’ final take:
Usman Sheikh, what truly fascinating times to we live in!
I think we’re now witnessing what I’ve called a few months ago in one of my contrarian reflections (“The AI Overlords”): the rise of the AI Nomenklatura and its Apparatchiks.
And long story short, the question I keep coming back to is this:
Do we trust the corporate fairytale that these god-like abilities will be used to “benefit all of humanity”?
OR
Do we consider the lessons of history and accept its uncomfortable lesson: Power often corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
The jury is still out on that one… but actually, not really 😄
4️⃣ The Matrix Isn’t Sci-Fi Anymore. It’s a Subscription – Michael Hutchens
I’m currently on holidays on an island in the middle of nowhere watching entire families of kids sitting on screens while dining with their parents at restaurants with a view of the ocean and sunset.
It’s now become very clear to me that big tech – from the social media behemoths Meta, TikTok, YouTube and X through to the growing wave of AI businesses led by ChatGPT – is giving us a choice between the red pill and the blue pill, and many of us are subconsciously choosing the blue pill.
For those too young to have seen The Matrix, the red pill allows you to see the true nature of our existence, with all its harsh realities and sharp edges, while the blue pill allows you to live in a dream like state of ignorant bliss.
There is nothing real about social media, it’s a carefully crafted perception of reality designed specifically to trigger your dopamine levels and steal your focus from reality in order to make tech titans even richer and more powerful.
They sell you connectivity while disconnecting you from reality and banning their own children from the addictive apps they’ve created.
And AI presents another opportunity to further degrade your brain for the benefit of others, if you choose to let it replace you rather than as a tool to extend your capabilities. And if you don’t know the difference you’re probably already taking the blue pill.
I love tech and I love innovation, and like most people am excited about the positive potential of all tech including AI, but if you’re not consciously thinking about how these things are effecting your brain and the brains of those you love, you are probably going down a dangerous path that’s hard to come back from, and leading your next generation down it with you.
This conscious reality check drove me off every social media platform other than LinkedIn eight years ago, and is the perspective from which I assess my use and potential use of all tech, including ChatGPT, which I’ve deeply researched and understand better than most.
It’s also why I impose military levels of discipline on my children’s screen use, and regularly tell them how it must be viewed in the same vein as sweets, alcohol, p*orn, gambling, and recreational drugs – i.e. fun sometimes but dangerous when used routinely.
Sitting in paradise today looking around me it’s very clear than I’m increasingly in a shrinking minority of people that haven’t yet given up and instead steadfastly choose the red pill with Neo.
The question I leave you with… If you’re being truly honest with yourself are you choosing the red pill or the blue pill?
Gaetan Portaels’ take:
Michael Hutchens, makes you wonder HOW this “fictional civilization” ended-up brain-chained and living inside a corporate Metaverse to begin with.
Many dismiss The Matrix as “science fiction,” some even hate it as “too far-stretched,” something that “clearly could never happen.”
But is it?
If we try to imagine the outset, the frog likely wasn’t thrown into boiling water (full-blown enslavement). It must have happened gradually.
Maybe the tipping point WAS entire families of kids glued to screens while dining with parents at restaurants with ocean views.
But looking back at the last 15 years of our non-fictional world, maybe The Matrix WAS a cautionary tale about creeping normality, digital sedation, and how we seamlessly adapt to the unacceptable.
Of course, there’s always the classic counterargument: Older generations have ALWAYS complained about the decline of youth. That being chained to a screen, physically present but mentally absent is “natural evolution.”
But is it?
This time, the “evolution” isn’t just a localized generational shift. For perhaps the first times in history, we’re watching a “generational pattern” run backwards. Older generations mimicking. The contagion isn’t isolated; it’s spreading like a virus.
Michael Hutchens’ reply:
Gaetan Portaels Very interesting comments mate. A friend told me recently that I was simply old now and frowning upon the younger generation like our parents did to ours, but I think this issue is much more serious and potentially much more damaging than those affecting prior generations.
It’s hard to think of a time in history when something has so significantly distracted people from their lives and loved ones, and make them so addicted to an unnatural level of dopamine, than what screens have done to us over the last two decades.
It’s completely re-wiring our brains and sense of self, and I don’t think in a positive way.
I truly believe it is creating different classes of people; those who are self-aware and extremely disciplined when using this stuff, and everyone else who’s basically letting their brains and minds be incepted and downgraded by computer algorithms built by strangers specifically to commoditise them via this process.
It sounds like a conspiracy theory but I genuinely believe this is what’s happening. Hence my post.
We’re living through the scariest Black Mirror episode ever…
Gaetan Portaels’ reply:
Michael Hutchens Hey, maybe you ARE old now. Let’s not rule that out just yet 😄😉
More seriously, I think it takes some strong cognitive dissonance to call this a “conspiracy theory” when faced with the fact.
By nearly every objective metric, people have never been this unhappy, anxious, disconnected, bored, lonely, or lost.
I know several who would HAPPILY be plugged into some kind of Eden Metaverse if given the chance. Just to escape the endless shades of grey their lives have become.
And when I say “people,” I’m NOT putting myself above it all. Because that’s probably the scariest part:
→ YES, I agree: There are the “self-aware” ones, and those LETTING their brains be hijacked and downgraded.
→ BUT even the “self-aware” aren’t immune. Maybe they resist more, maybe they fall slower. But it’s creeping in all the same.
The question I ask myself almost everyday is: “Where does this end?”.
Will we just adapt to the brain downgrade?
Will living with a deep, numbing sense of disconnection (maybe even chronic depression) become a natural, evolutionary byproduct of our time?
Are we on the edge of civilizational collapse?
Or, if the option comes, will we just plug ourselves into the Matrix?
Black Mirror indeed.
5️⃣ Corporate Circus: When Leaders Forget Who Employs Them – Jatin Modi
A luxury brand that defined cool spent millions on rebranding and sold 49 cars in response.
From his 25th-floor executive suite, Roberto Goizueta gazed out at the summer storm lashing the Coca-Cola tower in July 1985. Lamps flickered, lightning cracked, the wind howled. But this time it was only the weather.
Three months earlier, he’d stood before 200 reporters announcing New Coke would “taste better and people would love it.” Nearly 200,000 taste tests supported the decision. Science itself had blessed their bold vision.
Seventy nine days later, after 8,000 angry calls daily and 40,000 complaint letters, he called an emergency board meeting. ABC News anchor Peter Jennings interrupted America’s most popular soap opera General Hospital to announce Coca-Cola Classic was returning.
His message became legendary in corporate circles: “We have heard you.”
Today, Jaguar’s leadership watches their own storm gathering. After discontinuing nearly their entire lineup, they sold just 49 cars across Europe in April 2025.
Sales collapsed 97.5% after spending millions on a ‘Copy Nothing’ rebrand that removed their leaping cat logo, featured androgynous models but zero cars, and alienated their core customers to chase GenZ buyers who can’t afford £100,000 vehicles.
You can almost guess the thinking behind the rebrand. “We can’t beat Germans on engineering, Chinese on price, Tesla on tech.” “Quick, let’s become a cultural icon.”
The pattern repeats because the lie sounds so reasonable: if you’re failing as yourself, succeed as someone else. New Coke lasted 79 days. Jaguar’s transformation promises to stretch much longer, with far fewer chances for redemption.
When did bold innovation become indistinguishable from brand suicide?
Goizueta learned what Joseph Campbell knew: “The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek.” The treasure wasn’t a new formula, but simply the one gathering dust in an Atlanta bank vault.
Jaguar holds nine decades of engineering heritage, the purr of straight-six engines, the leaping cat that once symbolized untamed elegance. Instead of reclaiming what made them legendary, they’re performing in Miami art galleries, speaking to an audience that was never theirs.
Every crisis whispers the same lie: your problem is who you are, not what you forgot.
So we abandon everything that made us.
We chase new audiences, new identities, new everything.
Maybe the hardest thing isn’t becoming someone new.
It’s believing in who we already are.
6️⃣ Free Labor, Billion Dollar Exit – Grant Lee
Luis von Ahn sold reCAPTCHA to Google for tens of millions by getting people to work for free.
Then he did it again with Duolingo, and built a $21.5B business.
1. First, reCAPTCHA (2007):
Everyone saw spam prevention. Von Ahn saw volunteers.
Each time someone typed those distorted words, they were actually digitizing books that Optical Character Recognition couldn’t read.
Hundreds of millions of users. Zero transcription cost.
2. Then Duolingo (2012):
Creating language courses cost $60,000+ each.
Von Ahn’s solution: don’t hire anyone.
He launched the Incubator. Applications poured in. Not job applications, volunteers desperate to build courses for free.
Welsh speakers. Swahili speakers. Even Klingon fans.
They’d debate grammar until 3am. Rewrite lessons dozens of times. These weren’t employees. They were believers.
The Welsh course was built by volunteers fighting to save their language. Within 12 months: 200 volunteers, 40 courses, 11 million learners.
Course development cost: $0.
There’s a pattern here:
reCAPTCHA: Hide the work (users don’t even know)
Duolingo: Glorify the work (users don’t want payment)
Same outcome through opposite approaches.
Von Ahn understood something critical: The best work isn’t motivated by money. It’s motivated by meaning.
Traditional founders would’ve spent millions on curriculum designers. But who builds better courses: a PhD in Pittsburgh or native speakers preserving their culture?
Today: 10M paid users, $748M annually.
The foundation? Passionate volunteers who cared more about impact than income.
Most founders ask: “How much will this cost?”
Better question: “Who cares about this more than money?”
Find those people. Build for them.
Sometimes passion delivers what money can’t.
7️⃣ The Meeting Industrial Complex – Shashank Sharma
Now for this post from Shashank Sharma: Most meetings are a waste of time.
But we still sit through them. Every week. Every quarter. Every time someone feels uncertain and wants to feel important again.
The meeting culture didn’t begin as a time-waster. It began as ritual.
In the early 1900s, as corporations scaled post-industrial revolution, coordination became crucial. The boardroom became the nerve center. Meetings were where coal barons, factory owners, and rail magnates gave commands. Back then, decisions were centralised. Access was limited. The room mattered because power lived inside it.
But then the structure outgrew the purpose.
In the 1980s, management consultants institutionalised meetings. They sold frameworks. Brainstorming. Standups. Syncs. Feedback loops. Post-mortems. The corporate world took the bait. Meetings became proof of thinking. Activity became confused with progress.
And in India, it took a more layered form.
Here, meetings became theatre. A hierarchy showcase. The higher you are, the later you arrive. People repeat what’s already in the email. Junior folks stay quiet. Mid-levels agree. Senior folks speak in metaphors. The real work is deferred. And the one person who dares say, “Can we wrap this up?” gets labeled rebellious.
But here’s the deeper issue.
Meetings give the illusion of control. In companies where people don’t trust outcomes, they try to control input. Where ownership is missing, presence becomes currency. “Let’s discuss” replaces “Let’s decide.” Time gets filled instead of problems getting solved.
Some meetings are necessary. When crisis hits. When hearts are breaking. When a new direction needs shared conviction. But those are rare. The rest are coping mechanisms. A way to avoid the loneliness of real decision-making.
I’ve been in rooms where people discussed what to present in another meeting. I’ve attended hour-long calls to align on a one-line email. I’ve seen meeting invites arrive like weather. Unpredictable. Unplanned. Unproductive.
One of my managers was obsessed with meetings. He kept us in them all day. Then, in the end-of-day review, he would complain that work wasn’t moving. When I asked when I was expected to actually work, he got angry.
A calendar filled with meetings signals one of three things:
- A lack of clarity
- A fear of action
- A culture of control
If your team needs to meet to decide everything, it means something deeper is broken. Trust. Autonomy. Direction. No template can fix that.
The teams I’ve led didn’t meet to show work. They met to sharpen it. They didn’t talk for an hour to say nothing. They sent a crisp update and got back to building. They used time like capital. Rare. Valuable. Never wasted.
So ask yourself before scheduling: is this a meeting or a mirror? Are you aligning the team or avoiding the real issue?
Because progress doesn’t need a room. It needs responsibility.
And most of the time, it just needs a clear, well-written email.
8️⃣ Predictable Human Algorithms – Roger Dooley
Scientists just published something in Nature that will scare every marketer, leader, and anyone else who thinks they understand human choice.
Researchers created an AI called “Centaur” that can predict human behavior across ANY psychological experiment with disturbing accuracy. Not just one narrow task. Any decision-making scenario you throw at it.
Here’s the deal: They trained this AI on 10 million human choices from 160 different psychology experiments. Then they tested it against the best psychological theories we have.
The AI won. In 31 out of 32 tests.
But here’s the part that really got me…
Centaur wasn’t an algorithm built to study human behavior. It was a language model that learned to read us. The researchers fed it tons of behavioral data, and suddenly it could predict choices better than decades of psychological research.
This means our decision patterns aren’t as unique as we think. The AI found the rules governing choices we believe are spontaneous.
Even more unsettling? When they tested it on brain imaging data, the AI’s internal representations became more aligned with human neural activity after learning our behavioral patterns. It’s not just predicting what you’ll choose, it’s learning to think more like you do.
The researchers even demonstrated something called “scientific regret minimization”—using the AI to identify gaps in our understanding of human behavior, then developing better psychological models.
Can a model based on Centaur be tuned for how customers behave? Companies will know your next purchasing decision before you make it. They’ll design products you’ll want, craft messages you’ll respond to, and predict your reactions with amazing accuracy.
Understanding human predictability is a competitive advantage today. Until now, that knowledge came from experts in behavioral science and consumer behavior. Now, there’s Centaur.
Here’s my question: If AI can decode the patterns behind human choice with this level of accuracy, what does that mean for authentic decision-making in business? Will companies serve us better with perfectly tailored offerings, or with this level of understanding lead to dystopian manipulation?
What’s your take on predictable humans versus authentic choice?