Earlier this year, an engineering leader and colleague of mine posted something online that immediately raised my hackles.
The subject? Agentic AI. The specifics? AI workflows that carry out the full software development lifecycle without any human involvement.
Developing this capability, he argued, was “non-negotiable.”
Now, before we get into what troubled me so much about this comment (if it isn’t already obvious): I use AI every day as a software engineer. With that experience, I can say firsthand that these tools can eliminate—or at least accelerate—some of the drudgery that accompanies knowledge work.
So my angst at reading this post wasn’t the result of an ill-informed, general AI-aversion; it was what non-negotiable seemed to imply: that removing human labor from the software-development lifecycle was not merely something we should explore, but a pre-ordained outcome.
When I pointed out this potential interpretation1—and that it might be wise to avoid posting as such in public channels—it touched off what I can only categorize a minor theological dispute with the responses coming quickly and from a number of directions.
“This is inevitable.”
“This is progress. This is capitalism.”
Eventually, it became clear that the devout and the apostates weren’t going to resolve anything by pinging one another in Slack, which led to the original poster and I having a direct conversation.
Despite this not-so-subtle admission that we need humans in the loop to hash things out (irony machine go brr), the conversation quickly spiraled, instead centering largely around how this engineering leader should be allowed to express their opinion at work.
This was a peculiar defense, to be sure: I never suggested opinions were the problem. Instead, I’d asked for caution in the contents and context of what we post, particularly at a time when professional uncertainty and insecurity run amok. What’s more, the real crux of the issue seemed to be that I had expressed my opinion in response to theirs.
So it wasn’t that I challenged their right to believe something. It was that a leader’s beliefs about the future somehow became exempt from scrutiny once that future was declared inevitable.
And here, our keyword once more: inevitability.
The Gospel
I get the allure of declaring something inevitable. If something is inevitable, there’s no need to decide whether it’s good. No one has to ask who benefits from it. No one has to ask who loses.
Oh! And it means we don’t have to consider alternatives, build consensus, earn trust, or persuade skeptical colleagues (heretics!) that the change we want to make is one worth making. Inevitability also shields everyone from taking responsibility for the consequences. After all, what choice did we have?
I’ve come to frame this as the Gospel of Inevitability: the belief that because a technological, economic, or organizational change is likely to happen, we’re absolved of responsibility for deciding whether, how, and to what extent we participate in its manifestation.
How can we identify the Gospel of Inevitability? For one, proponents of it tend to speak in the passive voice (or something perilously similar to it).
This is where the industry is going. Jobs are going to change. This is just what we do now.
What they’ve conveniently set aside in leaning into this linguistic jiu-jitsu is that industries, on their own, do not move. Jobs do not change themselves. “This” does not become what we do through immaculate conception. People make these choices.
People allocate budgets. People set incentives. People define strategy, decide what to automate and what to preserve. People determine whether a new technology augments skilled workers or replaces them. People decide what kind of work is valuable, what kind of experience employees ought to have, and which costs are acceptable in pursuit of a particular vision of progress.
Inevitability as an Argument-Killer
In the end, it’s not that conversations featuring differing viewpoints should be avoided or seen as frustrating by their very nature. People are going to disagree. Making cogent arguments for what we believe in—how something should be built, who should own it, which features should be considered in or out of scope—is an everyday part of the job.
I’ll take this one step further and suggest healthy organizations require disagreement. It forces us to articulate what we believe, test our assumptions, confront evidence that makes us uncomfortable, and occasionally experience the character-building indignity of discovering someone else had a better idea.
This particular disagreement played out in a bothersome fashion, though, because the Gospel of Inevitability was deployed in place of any attempt to intellectually engage with the argument. There was no argument to be had; “inevitability” was invoked to see to that.
If full-scale AI-driven automation is inevitable, there’s no need to discuss whether it’s actually desirable. If it’s simply “progress,” there’s no need to define what progress means. If it’s simply “capitalism,” there’s no reason to talk about leadership, culture, employee trust, customer outcomes, professional craft, organizational mission, or human flourishing.
I’ve seen this play out far too often this year. At times, it’s produced a genuine cultural schism in which anything short of wholehearted enthusiasm is treated as resistance to progress itself.
And, as I’ve stated, when nuance becomes apostasy and dissent becomes heresy, consensus-building is no longer necessary. Why persuade when you can proclaim? Why cultivate buy-in when you can mandate? Why explain how a technology serves your organization’s mission when you can simply announce that this is what we do now?
That is how the Gospel of Inevitability becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy; a particular vision of AI adoption begins to look inevitable once enough people with authority agree to treat it that way. Its acceleration, as a result, becomes evidence for the inevitability they asserted in the first place.
Is this tautology? 💁♂️🦋
A Quote Finds Me
This conversation and its aftermath stuck with me for months. There was something about the inevitability aspect of the argument I couldn’t shake, but I couldn’t quite discern why.
Then I encountered the below passage while reading Attensity! A Manifestation of the Attention Liberation Movement, quoting sociologist Barrington Moore Jr.:
“People are evidently inclined to grant legitimacy to anything that is or seems inevitable no matter how painful it may be. Otherwise, the pain might be intolerable. The conquest of this sense of inevitability is essential to the development of politically effective moral outrage.”
There was more to the passage, but those lines spoke to the anger I’d felt for months. I wasn’t angry about AI in general, but rather something much older and, in my view, more sinister: the transformation of human choices into supposedly immutable laws of nature.
Inevitability does not merely engender surrender. It legitimizes it. If the future can’t be changed, resistance is irrational. And if resistance is irrational, then those who drive the change no longer need to defend their choices.
The uncomfortable thing about rejecting inevitability, meanwhile, is that responsibility rushes back in to fill the vacuum. If our choices matter, we own them. If another path is possible, we become accountable for the path we take.
If automation is not a force of nature but a set of decisions made by people, then we have to ask whether those decisions serve the people and institutions for whom we are responsible. That is a much heavier burden than inevitability.
This is, I suspect, why some people are so eager to put it down.
The Work of the Heretic
The Gospel of Inevitability asks us to surrender our judgment, which is why resisting it requires more than reflexive opposition. We need a way to decide which changes are worth pursuing and what form they ought to take.
This is where I think organizations most desperately need to rediscover something profoundly unfashionable: purpose.
What are we here to do? Whom are we here to serve? What problem have we been entrusted to solve?
Long-time readers will be unsurprised to see me coming back to the idea of purpose. I’ve written about it plenty before, about how mission statements—good ones, anyway—give us a lens through which to evaluate nearly any pursuit in an organization, and that includes technology.
If AI helps us better serve our customers, colleagues, communities, or organizational mandate, fantastic. Go ahead and use it. If it helps people do better work, learn faster, make wiser decisions, reduce drudgery, expand access, or create something previously impossible, pursue it!
But if adopting a technology becomes the mission itself, we have confused means with ends, and when leaders chase a technological paradigm without continually connecting it back to the actual purpose of their organization, they are not demonstrating vision. They are abdicating it.
Leadership is not pointing toward the loudest trend on the horizon and shouting “Forward!” It’s deciding where we ought to go and bringing people with us.
That requires conversation. It requires persuasion. It requires enough humility to entertain the possibility that the person raising their hand in the back of the room might not be standing in the way of progress. They might be trying to prevent you from walking off a cliff.
This is why somebody has to keep raising their hand. That, I think, is the role of the heretic.
Heretics ask who decided this? Why? Who benefits? Who carries the risk?
What are we trying to accomplish? How does this serve our mission? How does it serve our customers? How does it serve our colleagues?
What becomes possible because of this change—and what might become impossible? What human judgment are we preserving?
What would we choose if we refused to begin from the assumption that the choice had already been made?
None of this requires rejecting technological change. It requires something harder: participating in change without surrendering our judgment to it.
Knowledge, Power, Peace
At the beginning of August, during a period of acute uncertainty and anxiety, I did a druidic drawing of lots using Coelbren. For this reading, I opted to draw three: one for knowledge, one for power, and the last for peace.
The first of these, knowledge, delivered a message I interpreted as You have the strength to finish the job. My second drawing conveyed that There’s power to be found in uncertainty and imbalance.
And the third, the one for peace? Learn to accept what you can and cannot control.
Needless to say, I’ve carried these ideas with me ever since—particularly that last one. Why? Because accepting what we can’t control is not the same as accepting everything that happens to us.
True, there are institutions I can’t control. I can’t control the people around me, nor can I control their opinions. There are technologies whose development I can’t stop, economic incentives I can’t redirect, and decisions others will make regardless of how passionately I argue against them.
Peace requires acknowledging this, but agency requires something else. We must recognize what remains ours: our judgment, our voices, our work, our values. We must maintain our willingness to say no, to say yes, but not like this. We must hold fast to our willingness to build something different.
There’s no contradiction in accepting that the world will change while insisting we retain a role in deciding what that change should mean. In fact, I’ll argue the latter is our responsibility.
After all, inevitability is rarely as inevitable as its evangelists would have us believe. The future does not simply arrive; people build it.
And if people are going to build it, then the rest of us retain every right—perhaps even an obligation—to probe what they are building, to ask whom it serves, what it costs, and whether there might be a better way.
The Gospel of Inevitability asks us to surrender that responsibility, and I, for one, refuse.
Consider me a heretic.
For the record, I don't believe the people I disagreed with were secretly plotting the elimination of their colleagues' jobs. I suspect they saw extraordinary technological capability arriving quickly and believed that failing to pursue it aggressively would itself be irresponsible. I can understand that argument. What I struggle to accept is the leap from we should explore this to the outcome is inevitable, so any debate over whether—or how—we pursue it is beside the point.