We all know most divorces aren’t really about the socks on the floor. They’re about the conversation that didn’t happen six months ago — the need that got swallowed, the boundary that stayed ambiguous because that felt safer than drawing a line. The avoidance that got dressed up as patience. The thing you hoped would just work itself out if you gave it enough time and enough goodwill. It didn’t. It doesn’t. It just becomes the way things are, until someone can’t take it anymore and suddenly it’s about the socks.
Just buy a robot vacuum! It’s fast, it’s thorough, it covers the whole apartment in the time it used to take you to argue about whose turn it was. Solved, right? Except the socks are still on the floor. And now the vacuum is eating them, tangling them into its brushes, and you’re fighting about that instead — right on schedule, every day at 10 am.
That’s AI in most organizations right now. It magnifies well before it ever transforms. Good systems get faster. Clarity scales. But so does noise, so does avoidance, so does the thing nobody wanted to name. The promise of lightning fast iteration manifests as a chaotic reality at a superhuman cadence. The conversations you didn’t have don’t go away — they just surface in more places, at higher speed… right on schedule.
What’s needed is the same as it always was, long before any of this was about technology. Reflection, intentionality, communication. The willingness to stop and look at what you actually have — not the promise of what you could have — and do the hard, slow, human work of sorting it out. The robot is impressive. But the robot doesn’t negotiate the morning routine. People do.
Anna Elek 