The End of the World Can Wait Until After Dinner

My mother loved Nostradamus.

A paperback of his prophecies lived in our house for as long as I can remember. Predictions of collapse were part of the household climate. I grew up half expecting the end of the world to arrive before dinner. It never did.

What arrived instead was Watergate, oil shocks, the Cold War, Rodney King, 9/11, the dot-com crash, and COVID. Alongside all of it came the VCR, the microwave, the CD, the personal computer, the smartphone, the internet, Flash, CGI, and social media. Each brought real benefits, new habits, new inequities, and a fresh supply of folks certain this was the thing that would finally break us.

She also had a line for whatever urgent, dramatic subject had taken over the table: “That can wait until after dinner.” Usually, it was followed by, “We’ll discuss that later. For now, eat your food.”

She wasn’t saying the problem did not matter. She was saying that attention is finite, that gratitude is a discipline, and that we could not fix much on an empty stomach.

So when the AI conversation turns panicked, I recognize the voices.

There are currently two conversations happening at once, and both deserve more than a shrug across the dinner table.

The first is existential. Some of the people building the most advanced AI systems are themselves warning that its capabilities could outrun our ability to understand, govern, or control them. They’re not wrong to be concerned. A technology that can scale surveillance, persuasion, misinformation, and concentrated power needs serious rules, independent oversight, and people with the standing to say, “Enough.” But that fight isn't mine to win.

The second lands on my desk. It’s the revolt against AI slop: cheap, uncanny, derivative work poured into the world because it’s faster to make than to think through. If you work in advertising, design, film, writing, or music, you know the anxiety isn’t really about whether a machine can make an image. It’s about whether organizations will turn creative work into a volume contest and call the result innovation.

I’ve spent nearly three decades in corporate marketing and agency life. I can assure that cheap imitation, borrowed ideas, and mass-produced creative didn’t begin with generative AI.

What changed is velocity. And it's alarming.

One unexamined brief becomes a thousand unexamined executions before anybody asks whether the idea speaks anything true.

I mean, of course I get it. There was a can of Manwich in my mother’s pantry for the same reason there’s AI in ours: some nights, you just need dinner to move.

She never confused the can with the meal, or with the reason we were all at the table. It helped get food on the plate. It didn't decide what the conversation was. It didn't know who needed an extra chair, who'd had a hard day, or whether what was served was good enough to bring people back for more.

That’s the distinction we keep losing in the AI conversation. A machine can help us get somewhere faster. It can’t decide where we should go from there. It can give us an image, a first pass, a rough cut, a draft.

It can’t give the work heart. And it can’t give it taste.

Heart comes from human experience, emotional intelligence, and empathy. It comes from knowing what someone’s eyes are saying before their mouth moves. Taste is the practiced judgment that tells you when a shortcut is showing, when something feels synthetic, and when a beautiful image is really doing nothing.

Taste also knows when we’ve overcooked it: too much, too fast, served anyway.

That’s why the AI-slop concern is real. The technology alone is not the creative director, any more than the creative director was ever the whole team behind the idea. Someone still has to decide what’s worth making, what needs another pass, what deserves care, and what should never leave the kitchen.

History doesn’t prove AI is safe. “We survived before” isn’t a governance plan. Every era has to meet its dangers with its eyes open. But panic is a poor substitute for judgment.

And fear of a new technology is usually tangled up with something more private: fear of change, fear of losing what we’re attached to, fear that the way things used to be is already gone.

It is.

I’m Gen X. We don’t say, “Back in my day,” because we didn’t have a day. The ground has always been moving beneath us.

If AI clears repetitive work, do we make better work, or just more of it? Do we use the time to better understand the people we’re trying to reach? Do we give some of it back to the conversations and relationships that make the work matter?

For those of us leading creative teams, the responsibility is pretty simple. Use AI to widen research, rough out possibilities, take tedious production off a team’s plate, and create room for better thinking and more empathy.

Don’t use speed to dodge authorship, consent, judgment, or care. Credit the people making the calls. Protect the audience’s attention. Keep a human being’s name and face on whatever goes out the door.

AI may change the economics of creativity. It can't decide what's worth saying, what kind of world we owe one another, or who belongs at the table. That part is still ours.

So yes: take the existential warnings seriously. Reject the slop. Build the guardrails. Demand the craft. Then take the fear itself and put it to work.

My mother had a way of putting it: “The body has a way of telling us we need to slow down.”

Fear is attention. Your whole nervous system is pointing at something and saying, “Look.” Not every warning means stop forever. But every honest fear is telling us something about what we value.

My mother read about the end of the world for decades and still made dinner every night. That’s what I keep coming back to. The worry drove her to pray harder. To read more. She called her friends and family more often than anyone I’ve known. She got deeper into her church, showed up for local government, and made herself useful to the people around her.

Her answer to dread was not denial. It was presence. Make dinner. Make the phone call. Show up. Pay attention. Be useful.

Dread never talked her out of her life. It drove her further into it.

That’s the posture I’m choosing, and I don’t think there’s a line between doing that at home and at work. One begets the other. The curiosity you practice around what scares you is the curiosity that gets you closer to an audience. The empathy you build checking on a worried friend is the empathy that hears what a customer can’t quite say. If fear around AI makes us ask harder questions, listen closer, and care more about what we put our names on, then fear did its job. It became fuel.

“That can wait until after dinner,” my mother would say. Not because the danger was imaginary, but because we needed to feed people, regain our perspective, and be strong enough to do something useful about it.

The end of the world can wait until after dinner. There’s work worth doing before then -- and someone worth calling after.

By Patrick Conreaux, Founder & CSO, Sageworx. To get in touch with Pat, follow him on LinkedIn or connect via email @sageworx.com