Every other thing here puts you on the receiving end of a system. Not this one. Now you’re the
one with the dial. You run RushDash, a delivery app, and the board wants growth. Choose what the
dispatch algorithm optimizes — then look at everything your dashboard doesn’t show you.
What you just did
The dashboard you were handed measured your success — deliveries, revenue, margin. It did not
measure the cost of getting there, so that cost stayed invisible to you while you optimized. That
isn’t a glitch; it’s how metrics work. Push any single number hard enough and it starts to consume
everything the number doesn’t capture. (Goodhart’s law: when a measure becomes a target, it stops being a
good measure.)
AI makes this sharper, not gentler: it can drive your chosen objective harder, faster, and at more scale
than any human team — so the side-effects pile up faster too, still off your dashboard, still landing on
people who never agreed to the trade.
Wielding power well isn’t refusing to optimize. It’s owning what your metric omits — deciding,
before you ship, to measure the harm too, and then actually looking at it. The wisdom is in what you choose
to put on the dashboard. That’s the whole game, and it gets more decisive the more powerful the lever you’re
holding.