At peace, or in a quasi steady state, yes. But not in all situations. Eg. in war or other adversarial situations you need to both be making progress and be as unpredictable as possible, in the hope that in some indefinite future you can exterminate and/or enslave the other players.
As the world is becoming more and more war-like, these types of strategies can become more and more advantageous. And you don't need actual military war or even physical violence. Actually it's even better without these, since non-military non-violent war-type adversarial state can be sustained forever!
In an arms race type of business situation, if your progress is predictable it means you're not moving fast enough, and somebody else will outrun you! And moving more from competing on marketshare (fighting for more from the same pie) to competing on progress would be awesome too.
I absolutely love unpredictable progress, and I'm really optimistic about the direction the world is evolving to... endless war and without (most of) the death and violence part will be a great catalyst for high-risk-high-reward technological and scientific progress! And as volatility increases maybe more and more of the businesses that depend on "the world staying stable and predictable" will be wiped out and create some breathing room and opportunity for new more flexible and open players. If predicting the future is no longer on the table, you need to invest in true agility, eg. ability to quickly change direction and speed when you glimpse a new future, maybe replace most specialists with teams of nimble quickly-retrainable AI-augmented-expert-generalists etc.
And back to the AI side... we need to stop playing the "predictions game", you never want to actually predict what will really happen in the real world, you want to predict what could have happened and then immediately interfere and change the direction of things to invalidate that prediction (sabotaging other players that probably also made the same prediction)... hopefully to produce a change in the direction you want... but if that can't work, "using AI to inject volatility and invalidate others' predictions" could be a valid business strategy too...
The comment is definitely with regards to businesses and with regards to advances made by the business as seen by stakeholders.
I did not intended this to apply to anything else.
I may have made an error in my post, though. Making unpredictable progress is not lethal in itself if you can show steady progress. It should have probably been worded "lack of steady progress is lethal to businesses". It is ok to have some unpredictable projects as long as you can build trust with steady progress somewhere else in sufficient quantity.
At peace, or in a quasi steady state, yes. But not in all situations. Eg. in war or other adversarial situations you need to both be making progress and be as unpredictable as possible, in the hope that in some indefinite future you can exterminate and/or enslave the other players.
As the world is becoming more and more war-like, these types of strategies can become more and more advantageous. And you don't need actual military war or even physical violence. Actually it's even better without these, since non-military non-violent war-type adversarial state can be sustained forever!
In an arms race type of business situation, if your progress is predictable it means you're not moving fast enough, and somebody else will outrun you! And moving more from competing on marketshare (fighting for more from the same pie) to competing on progress would be awesome too.
I absolutely love unpredictable progress, and I'm really optimistic about the direction the world is evolving to... endless war and without (most of) the death and violence part will be a great catalyst for high-risk-high-reward technological and scientific progress! And as volatility increases maybe more and more of the businesses that depend on "the world staying stable and predictable" will be wiped out and create some breathing room and opportunity for new more flexible and open players. If predicting the future is no longer on the table, you need to invest in true agility, eg. ability to quickly change direction and speed when you glimpse a new future, maybe replace most specialists with teams of nimble quickly-retrainable AI-augmented-expert-generalists etc.
And back to the AI side... we need to stop playing the "predictions game", you never want to actually predict what will really happen in the real world, you want to predict what could have happened and then immediately interfere and change the direction of things to invalidate that prediction (sabotaging other players that probably also made the same prediction)... hopefully to produce a change in the direction you want... but if that can't work, "using AI to inject volatility and invalidate others' predictions" could be a valid business strategy too...