PERSON
William Bridges
The organizational consultant who identified the most important distinction the entire discourse around artificial intelligence has failed to make: change is the external event, transition is the psychological process by which a human being lets go of the old reality—and the two operate on timescales so different that treating them as the same thing is not merely imprecise, it is the primary reason technology transformations produce trauma instead of renewal.
Bridges arrived at his central insight not through organizational theory but through literary criticism. His doctoral work at Columbia in the 1960s examined how novelists and poets described the inner experience of passages from one stage of life to another. What struck him was the gap between the external event and the internal experience: a character loses a job, and that is the change, describable in a sentence—but the transition, the dismantling of the identity the job sustained, the disorientation of the in-between, the slow emergence of a new self, takes the entire novel. He published his framework in Transitions: Making Sense of Life’s Changes in 1980, and the opening sentence of that book is one of the most useful sentences in the literature of technology
Keep reading with YOU ON AI
Unlock the full book, 10,000+ field-guide entries, and a 1000+ thinker library. If you have a book code, register now — it takes a minute.