April 3, 2026 · 8 min read
Surveillance or shared understanding
AI gives us a genuine choice. We can build faster surveillance, or we can build shared understanding. The two are not the same, and the future will not let us pretend they are.
There is a comfortable story about AI in the workplace: it will give managers better dashboards, employees better assistants, and everyone better decisions. Underneath that story sits a quieter one: it will give whoever runs the system a finer-grained view of everyone inside it.
Both stories are true. The question is which one we decide to build for.
Surveillance scales beautifully. It does not require trust; it requires only sensors and storage. Shared understanding scales poorly. It requires conversation, context, and the willingness to be wrong in public. Of course we are tempted by the cheaper one.
But organizations are not optimization problems. They are coordination problems. And coordination problems are solved by shared understanding, not by surveillance — no matter how high the resolution gets.