Human beings like winning in the short term.

The biological dopamine rush, the external status acknowledgement, and the internal ego boost can’t be beat as motivators to continue to refine the processes that bring a short-term win. And with every new technology, the ability to shorten the distance between idea and outcomes that produce all those good feelings gets faster and faster.

We are observing this phenomenon in real time right now with top-down LLM adoption in organizations across the board. Thus, to gain a short-term win with shareholders, the market, and his board, a public-company CEO fires 21,000 people and then sails off on his yacht. As it turns out, even the highest-ranking CEO is still a human being pursuing the same short-term wins that even the lowliest fentanyl addict on the street is pursuing. And with the same motivators.

The ever-present challenge of being human is repressing, redirecting, reexamining, and rejecting (very often) the temptation to pursue processes that result in short-term wins that have long-term consequences and repercussions. They weren’t much, but society used to have robust institutions such as families, communities, churches, and civic organizations that kept people (everyone from CEOs to drug addicts) bound and focused on mid and long-range goals.

Did they work “perfectly” 100% of the time? No. But we decided about 80 years ago to start trading, pursuing long-term reality for the pursuit of short-term utopia. And that desire for the short-term win produced long-term consequences.

One of the “knock-on” effects of people losing trust and confidence in institutions is not that they stopped pursuing short-term goals; it’s that people doubled down on pursuing those short-term wins even harder. But now, without a brake on their behaviors. And as we have seen time and again, in ways large and small, people will continue to race to the bottom, without some combination of external and internal brakes.

And eventually, without those brakes, people will win their race to the bottom.

Smart people, paying attention, and tracking human behavior are correct to be worried about the long-term effects of LLM adoption. As they are correct to be worried about the increase in fentanyl use, the decline of institutional trust, and the erosion of the American family core. Smart people, however, need to understand that all these short-term wins that people, communities, and institutions are pursuing are not occurring in a vacuum, nor are they disconnected from each other.

Let us have the same opprobrium and criticism for a CEO as we do for the hard drug addict. And let us rebuild the external and internal brakes that will mitigate the temptation to pursue short-term wins, for the temptation is the same for both of them, and equally damaging to themselves and others around them.