#485 AI, Asbestos in the Walls?
Friday Ship #485 | April 3rd, 2026
This week we continued exploring enhancements to Parabol which will make our software much easier to automate via AI.
Cory Doctorow, prolific author and thinker, and coiner of the term “Enshittification” recently gave remarks on the world we’re creating for ourselves with AI:
AI is the asbestos we are shoveling into the walls of our society and our descendants will be digging it out for generations.
The general drive of management to reduce labor costs and raise profits is driving the replacement of skilled labor with AI, and leading to the loss of presently unseen value workers contribute we won’t see until it’s too late.
Having lived through many rising vogues in technology – from the original rise of the web and e-commerce, mobile, remote work, block chain, and now AI – the effect of AI will no doubt be both profound and different than we can predict from here.
One prediction of Doctorow’s that is already likely true is:
AI isn’t going to wake up, become superintelligent and turn you into paperclips – but rich people with AI investor psychosis are almost certainly going to make you much, much poorer.
Last year met an investor who decided to pass investing in our business and gave the feedback:
Parabol still seems to believe that humans are at the center of work, and our thesis is that in the future there will only be capital allocators and AI, and we’re investing in founders that are developing on that mission.
Yikes. Yes, we very much believe that humans will be at the center of decision making. After all, if we’re not living and working to make the world a better place for our fellow human beings then who are we working for?
Keeping Humans in the Center
We believe in a world where everybody can leverage AI when it makes sense. If tools serve to give people leverage, then AI will be one of the longest levers people can put to their disposal in human history. We think Parabol can be a place for human beings to work together with AI: creating and evolving knowledge—kept safe and private on their own infrastructure, enriching collaborative activities, making decisions, improving processes, and keeping accountable on tasks. In other words, working to enrich process knowledge, not lose it.
Metrics
A slight recovery of platform activity over last week. With next week’s easter holiday, we expect to see a quiet week.
This week we…
…focused on customer success. We have a bunch of large accounts onboarding as customers, and this week we spent time making sure they have all they need to be successful scaling Parabol across their enterprises.
Next week we’ll
…explore what it will take to bring our OAuth 2 API to general release. Having a public API will enable folks using AI agents to automate interactions in Parabol.
Jordan Husney
Jordan leads Parabol’s business development strategy and engineering practice. He was previously a Director at Undercurrent, where he advised C-Suite teams of Fortune 100 organizations on the future of work. Jordan has an engineering background, holding several patents in distributed systems and wireless technology. Jordan lives and works in Los Angeles, CA.