The awards ceremony wasn’t broadcast live. The BBC aired it with a two-hour delay, meaning this was not an unfiltered moment that simply “happened” to viewers. It was an edited broadcast. Edited broadcasts are not neutral; they reflect human judgment, priorities, and power. Both the original and the aired version had "inappropriate shoutouts.” Producers cut Akinola Davies Jr., saying “Free Palestine,” making it unmistakably clear that editorial intervention was underway. Choices were made. Among those choices, the N-word shouted at two Black actors remained. That is not neutrality. That is a decision, and decisions like that deserve scrutiny.

Was it malice or incompetence?

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.