Becky Yoose

"In 1958, Mao ordered every village in China to produce steel. Farmers melted down their cooking pots in backyard furnaces and reported spectacular numbers. The steel was useless. The crops rotted. Thirty million people starved. In 2026, every other company is having top down mandate on AI transformation. Same energy." Heck of a way to start my morning 😅 :blobcatcoffee:

"Your AI usage is now a KPI. You are being evaluated on how much grain you reported, not how much grain you grew. This is Goodhart’s Law at organizational scale: when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. The metric was supposed to track whether AI is making the company better. Instead, the entire company is now optimizing to make the metric look better. The beatings will continue until adoption improves." A proposed redesign of one of the levels of Dante's Hell, perhaps?

Sidenote - I can't overstate the impact of Fobazi's work in the library field and beyond. Google Scholar puts her article's "cited by" number at 510, but I suspect that number is much higher if we expand the count to resources not captured by Scholar as well as everyday conversation and workplace discussions. For example, the latest reference to her work when I do a search on her name on Mastodon - https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic/115667526099327862

@coral@code4lib.social 😩