For the last year, the debate around AI at work has split into two unhelpful extremes. On one side, we have breathless talk of “AI coworkers,” complete with onboarding rituals, performance reviews, and soft-focus imagery of humans and machines collaborating happily at their desks. On the other, we have an anxious counter-reaction that insists this language is dangerous, misleading, and fundamentally wrong, because AI systems are not people and should never be spoken of as if they were. Both camps miss the point. The real question is not whether machines deserve human metaphors, but whether leaders understand what kind of economic force they are unleashing, and what kind of organization that force demands.

At first glance, Disney’s recent moves look contradictory. The company announces a sweeping partnership with OpenAI that allows its characters to appear inside generative tools like Sora, while almost simultaneously firing off cease-and-desist letters to Google and pressing forward with aggressive litigation against Midjourney. To some observers, this looks like confusion. To anyone who has watched Disney for long enough, it looks like something else entirely. This is a company that has spent a century mastering the art of adapting control to new forms of participation.

For years, Waymo’s autonomous vehicles were known as the politest drivers in San Francisco. They came to full stops, waited patiently at four-way intersections, yielded generously, and behaved with a kind of algorithmic courtesy that seemed almost naive. Then, as the Wall Street Journal recently reported, they began to behave very differently: darting around double-parked trucks, merging aggressively, accelerating the instant a light turned green, even performing the occasional illegal U-turn. Basically, like a NYC taxi driver.

In 2013, a quiet software developer known to his colleagues as "Bob" became briefly infamous when investigators discovered that he had secretly outsourced his entire job to a contractor in China. He had mailed his security credentials overseas, paid the contractor a fraction of his six-figure salary, and spent his own workdays browsing Reddit and watching cat videos. Yet his performance reviews were stellar. Bob was, by every visible metric, one of the company’s best engineers. When his secret arrangement was uncovered, he was fired. But a decade later, his story looks less like a strange aberration and more like a preview of work in the age of AI.

Tokyo moves with the cool precision of an algorithmic machine. Step out of Shinjuku Station at dusk and the city unfurls around you in layers of neon haze—LED kanji flickering like loose packets on a network, billboards pulsing with the heartbeat of a vast digital organism. Crowds slide past in silent, perfect non-collision, as if everyone is running the same invisible protocol. In a metropolis of 37 million, you brace for chaos. Instead you get choreography—an improbable calm humming beneath the circuitry of the streets.