At every conference, someone reaches for the tranquilizer line: “AI is just a tool—like a camera.” It sounds sensible because cameras calmed us once: art didn’t die; it changed. But cameras point at the world and capture what’s there. Modern AI points at us and proposes what comes next—labels, scores, sentences that other systems treat as facts.

Your policy window is narrowing.

FaceMash wasn’t a prank; it was a prototype—rating women like trading cards. I even watched an MSDN colleague rank dates in an Excel “marriageable” index at work; the eye-roll response from executives was governance by shrug.

We often consider digital technologies like data platforms, AI, and copilot features as tools. But if we're rethinking the future of work and the future of careers and companies, it's helpful to think of these things as augmenting our efforts. For a copilot in particular, it becomes a junior coworker or maybe a more senior co-worker as the AI skills get better.