AI, Existential Crises, and Your Business’s Future
I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about AI and our future, and I’m still left with more questions than answers. In fact, I have almost nothing but questions—but at least they keep evolving, so I count that as progress!
Some of my questions are big-picture, like:
- How does an economy function in a world that may look a lot like universal basic income?
- Who do we tax to pay for all of that? Nvidia? OpenAI? DeepSeek?
- Sure, I get it—creative destruction, new jobs replacing old ones, blah blah. But let’s be real: the scale and speed of this shift feel… different.
Then there are the more personal questions:
- What kind of world will my grandchildren live in?
- What will motivate them when AI can do almost everything?
- Are we back to Mutually Assured Destruction, but now with AI—”My AI will kill your AI before it kills me”?
A recent PwC survey of Canadian CEOs found that 35% of them don’t think their business will be relevant in 10 years. Let that sink in. Now apply that to your industry: engineering, law firms, the music and film industry, healthcare, creative functions—anyone feeling confident?
It’s fascinating. It’s terrifying. And if you’re a CEO and not thinking about this, I’d wager you’ll have some serious regrets. You don’t need answers yet, but you do need to be asking the right questions.
While pondering all of this, I came across two particularly interesting quotes from a recent Wall Street Journal article on DeepSeek AI (“What to Know About China’s DeepSeek AI,” WSJ, January 28, 2025):
- AI is learning to question itself.
“In a paper published last week, the Chinese researchers behind DeepSeek said their new model would sometimes suddenly stop and realize it should re-evaluate its initial approach to a problem, and allocate more thinking time to do so. They described the behavior as the model having an ‘Aha!’ moment.”
So AI understands confirmation bias and can prevent itself from breathing its own exhaust? That’s more than I can say for a lot of executives (or politicians).
- AI thrives on the right incentives.
“Rather than explicitly teaching the model how to solve a problem, we simply provide it with the right incentives, and it autonomously develops advanced problem-solving strategies,” the researchers wrote.
Sound familiar? Because that’s exactly how great leadership works. You don’t micromanage; you set the right incentives and let people (or AI) figure out the best solutions.
Random thoughts? Maybe. But I’d rather be asking messy, uncomfortable questions than burying my head in the sand.
coaches CEOs to higher levels of success. He is a former CEO and has led teams as large as 7,000 people. Todd is the author of, Never Kick a Cow Chip On A Hot Day: Real Lessons for Real CEOs and Those Who Want To Be (Morgan James Publishing).
Connect with Todd on LinkedIn, Twitter, call 303-527-0417 or email [email protected].