I’ve spent two months consulting for an insurance business client. Insurance is like a bank, except it deals not in people’s money, but their misfortune. I find the work boring. I also have a feeling the clients can sense my lack of data modeling skills. My incompetence is due to laziness, which is due to boredom, which is due to overstimulation from software and chemicals in my brain.
In my first essay, I explained:
“The world is made up of principals and agents. Owners and workers. An age old problem has been to get the goals of both to align. Employers can authorize certain restrictions to the actions of their agents. Employees can choose to disobey certain protocols set by their principal.”
As a corporate consultant, I’m part of a much larger firm made up of many principals and agents. I’m just an agent meant to build software and data solutions. The clients, project manager, and “career advisor” are my principals, but they’re also agents reporting to someone else. Associates report to seniors, who report to project managers, who report to executives, who report to CEOs, who report to shareholders. And so on. This is what corporations call “org chart,” which is like a family tree, but with a bunch of LinkedIn connections organized by hierarchy.
The cool thing about large language models like GPT is that it lets people become their own principal, by prompting instructions for AI agents to follow. “If you want it done, go. If not, send.”
