UpTrajectory Review

Natalie Nixon's Fast Company essay is less a report than a dispatch from a workshop she ran. The author, a creativity consultant, asked roughly 50 people to perform a pre-mortem: imagine the AI-dystopia has already arrived in ten years, then name one mindset shift, one behavioral change, and one process change you would make today to prevent it. The responses clustered around transparency, demanding ethically designed AI, slowing the workday for deep thought, and — the part worth pausing on — deliberately designing friction into workflows rather than stripping it out. Her conclusion: AI output should be scaffolded by human consciousness as input.

For a small-business operator, this lands differently than it does for a Fortune 500 strategy team. Most owner-operators don't have an AI ethics committee or a chief humanist. They have a ChatGPT tab open, a bookkeeper asking whether invoices can be auto-drafted, and a creeping sense that speed is becoming the default. Nixon's respondents are essentially describing what a healthy small business already does at its best: a human checks the output, a human owns the decision, and the process has enough slack for someone to notice when something feels off. The essay is a useful reminder that adopting AI doesn't have to mean adopting it at Silicon Valley pace.

The genuinely interesting claim here is the defense of friction. The dominant AI narrative in business media is elimination: kill the toil, automate the drudgery, compress the workflow. Nixon's small sample pushed back — they want embodied learning, pauses, slowness, the kind of productive resistance that catches errors before they scale. We're sympathetic to this, with one caveat: friction is a luxury good. A solo operator drowning in admin doesn't need more pauses; they need fewer invoices to chase. The essay doesn't wrestle with that asymmetry, and it's the tension the original likely leaves unexplored.

The second-order effect worth watching is how 'human-in-the-loop' becomes a marketing label rather than a practice. If enough consultants and vendors adopt Nixon's framing — human consciousness as input, friction as feature — we'll soon see AI tools sold with 'thoughtful by design' badges that mean nothing. Small businesses are especially vulnerable to this kind of positioning because they lack the staff to audit claims. The cost of fake friction is real: slower processes that don't actually produce better judgment, just slower output and a false sense of diligence.

What to do: run Nixon's pre-mortem with your own team, even if that's two people and a contractor. Ask the three questions — mindset, behavior, process — and write the answers down somewhere you'll see them in six months. Then pick one workflow where AI is currently producing unreviewed output and add a single checkpoint: a human reads it before it ships. That's the whole intervention. It won't prevent the dystopia, but it will prevent the specific dystopia where your business ships something wrong at machine speed.

The essay's real value isn't its rigor — fifty informal respondents is a conversation, not a study — but its timing. The AI adoption conversation has been dominated by capability: what the tools can do. Nixon is asking a prior question: what kind of work do we actually want to do. For operators who've been feeling the pressure to automate everything yesterday, that's a permission slip worth keeping.

“In short, we should scaffold AI output with human consciousness as inputs.” — Fast Company

Takeaway: Run a pre-mortem with your team on AI dystopia, then add one human review checkpoint to any workflow where AI output currently ships unexamined.