His constant fast-talking and failure to listen turned what should have been a brief transaction into a two hour ordeal—I’ll spare you the details. Suffice it to say that Adam’s version of “efficiency” led to inefficiency and customer dissatisfaction. Speed kills the capacity to listen and understand what the situation calls for, and that ain’t all…
II. This minor episode took me back to a consulting job I once did. One of the big AI (Artificial Intelligence) companies asked me to meet with a team of computer engineers charged with helping their model develop “a sense of morality.” Yes, you read that right. It’s now well-known that AI models are sycophants. They will agree with, flatter, or validate the user’s opinions, even if they are incorrect, irrational, or harmful. (If that reminds you of POTUS’s minions, hang on. I’m getting there…)
For two hours, I listened to these young tech geniuses talk about the AI they helped create, asking a few questions along the way. I was impressed by their brilliance. But most of them spoke as fast as Adam did, at a pace that left me breathless as a listener. My concern about their project grew as I got drawn into the supersonic pace at which the tech industry moves; for years, one tech giant’s internal motto was “Move fast and break things.” When my time to respond arrived, I shared a few ideas about AI and ethical constraints, then said this:
“My concern is not only about AI—it’s about you and the pressure under which you work. Speed kills the capacity for focus, ethics and wisdom, and the technology that results from speeding may kill us, too. If slowing down in your kind of work sounds idealistic, here’s a real-life story. A master surgeon was teaching her students a critical moment in open heart surgery. ‘At this moment,’ she said, ‘you have sixty seconds to tie off the artery before the patient dies, so you had better take your time.’ That’s the surgeon I want if I go under the knife—one who knows how to work under pressure as if she had all the time in the world, so her hand won’t tremble and kill me. I want the same in the pilot who captains my next flight, and in the computer engineers who shape our future. Slowing down in the midst of pressure is key to survival, and mindfulness is a learnable skill.”
III. Looking for a political example of how speed kills? It’s close at hand: POTUS is on speed. During his breakneck first 100 days in office, he issued 145 Executive Orders (FDR needed only 99 to start rescuing the U.S. from the Great Depression). He also sent us a plague named Elon Musk, who devoured civil servants faster than the locusts of Exodus 10 laid waste to Egypt. With the ruthlessness of a serial murderer, Musk killed federal support services for those in need, at home and abroad.
As a result, we now know that “speed kills” quite literally. Look at the lives that have been destroyed by POTUS’s frenzy to Make America Grieve Again. A study by public health experts at Yale suggests that MAGA legislation to cut back on Medicaid and weaken the Affordable Care Act “could result in over 51,000 additional, preventable American deaths each year.” God knows how that number will grow as the plague known as RFK, Jr. goes unchecked, and as Organized Stupidity, Inc. kneecaps medical science in the U.S.
Now look around the world. By January 2026, cuts to USAID had been estimated to cause more than 762,000 deaths abroad, with over 500,000 of those being children. That number will grow exponentially for years to come, and no one will know by how much because, in a strange coincidence, POTUS eliminated most of our tracking systems. Of course, none of his minions will blow the whistle on outrages of this sort: the sycophancy of the MAGA regime makes AI look like a piker.
© Peter Cox | Dreamstime
IV. If you want to attribute my discomfort with speed to the fact that I’m 87, feel free. But be prepared for a vigorous, slow-paced rebuttal! “Old souls” of all ages have objected to speed, as did French philosopher Blaise Pascal who published this thought at age thirty-one, roughly the same age as Adam: “All of humanity’s problems stem from [our] inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” Every wisdom tradition I know—from secular humanism to the world religions—lifts up the link between slowing down, reflecting, and living more deeply grounded lives.
Democracy itself depends on our capacity to stop speeding long enough to listen to each other, then respond (rather than react), then listen some more. The MAGA mess we’re in is due, in part, to American impatience. A majority of us rightly wanted a fix—a fix we still need—and wanted it right now. So we elected an authoritarian government, the only kind that can work at warp speed to transform (read “screw up”) a nation. The highly predictable result is the pool-pah (to quote Kurt Vonnegut) we’re in today.
At the same time, it’s true that I am an old man, and slow is the only way I go or want to go! For me, this is one of the gifts of age: the realization that time is precious, and that I can make the most of it not by speeding and desperately doing more, but by slowing down and savoring every moment of life.
So, as a Memo to Self, I’ll paraphrase the story I told those young computer engineers and turn it inward: “At age 87 you have, at best, a few years left before you die, so you had better take your time.”