Inspired by an excellent post on LinkedIn by Sam Meek on the problems of the Machine – Man interface with reference to AI, I asked the purely fictional Mayor Vaughn to write a guest post on this very topic..
A Guest Blog by Larry Vaughn, Former Mayor of Amity Island
You know me. I’m the guy who wore the anchor-print suit. I’m the guy who told the press, “I’m pleased and happy to repeat the news that we have caught… and killed… a large predator.” I’m the guy who kept the beaches open on the Fourth of July because I was terrified of losing those summer dollars.
And yes, I’m the guy who was wrong.
I learned a hard lesson in 1975: ignoring the experts because the reality is inconvenient doesn’t make the problem go away. It just makes the consequences messier.
Looking at the modern business landscape, particularly in the Geospatial Industry (if it is one?) , I see a lot of you making the same mistakes I did. You have more data than that pesky Chief Brody ever had. You have satellites, drones, and location intelligence that can track a crab across the sand from orbit. But when it comes time to make the hard call, you’re still standing on the ferry acting like everything is fine.
Here is why leaders are drowning in data but starving for wisdom, and why your maps are being ignored just like I ignored that chewed-up girl on the beach.
The “Summer Dollars” Syndrome
In Amity, the logic was simple: If we close the beaches, the town dies. The economic data (short-term profit) outweighed the biological data (there is a giant shark).
In the geospatial world, you collect massive amounts of information. You have terabytes of raster imagery, point clouds, and vector data. But often, leaders overlook this data when it conflicts with their “gut feeling” or immediate quarterly goals.
Take Town Planning and Flood Risk. We have LIDAR data now that can map elevation changes down to the centimeter. We can model exactly where the water will go during a 100-year storm. The GIS analysts (your modern-day Matt Hoopers) point to the map and say, “Mr. Mayor, if you build those luxury flats here, the basement will be underwater in five years.”
But the developer sees the waterfront view. The Council sees the tax revenue. So, what do they do? They say, “You’re gonna yell ‘Barracuda!’ and panic everyone?” They ignore the hydrological model, approve the development, and five years later, they’re asking for a government bailout. They prioritised the “summer dollars” over the geographical reality.
Treating Data Like a “Bad Fish”
Remember when some guys caught a Tiger Shark and we all thought the nightmare was over? Hopper told me, “The bite radius is different.” He had the metrics. He had the forensic measurement. I didn’t want to hear it because the Tiger Shark was an easy answer.
Leaders do this with Site Selection all the time.
I’ve seen retail giants collect petabytes of mobile location data. They have heatmaps showing exactly where their customers live, drive, and shop. The data says, “Open the new distribution center in Sector A to optimize delivery times by 15%.”
But the CEO? He likes Sector B better. Maybe it’s closer to his golf course. Maybe he just has a “good feeling” about it. He looks at the heatmap and treats it like a suggestion rather than a science. He ignores the spatial correlation because it doesn’t fit the narrative he wants. He hangs the Tiger Shark on the dock and calls it a victory, while the Great White is still swimming in the P&L statement.
The Glitch in the Human Operating System
Here is the thing nobody admits: Maybe I wasn’t just being greedy. Maybe I was suffering from a Man-Machine Interface failure.
We humans—even Mayors—are irrational by nature. We are wired to seek patterns that confirm our hopes (optimism bias) and ignore patterns that confirm our fears (normalcy bias).
In your industry, you build incredible dashboards. You create Digital Twins of entire cities. But have you considered the “user interface” of the decision-maker’s brain?
When you hand a non-technical leader a complex GIS map layered with fifty variables, their brain often shuts down. They can’t process the signal from the noise. It’s too abstract. So, they revert to their default setting: Irrational Hope.Hooper showed me science; I saw a complication. The “machine” (the data) was working perfectly, but the “operator” (me) couldn’t parse the output.
If your geospatial insights aren’t translated into a language that cuts through human irrationality—if it’s just raw data without a compelling narrative—your leader is going to stare at it, blink twice, and say, “I think the beaches are safe.”
Listen to Your Chief Brody
Your GIS team, your data scientists, your remote sensing experts—they are the ones out on the boat chumming the water. They are the ones seeing the blips on the sonar.
When they bring you a dashboard showing that your supply chain is vulnerable to climate risks, or that your agricultural yield prediction is down based on multispectral satellite imagery, don’t gloss over it.
I know it’s tempting. I know you want to shout, “Amity is a summer town! We need summer dollars!” I know you want to launch the product anyway, or build the factory on the fault line, or ignore the demographic shift because it’s inconvenient to pivot.But spatial data is the most grounded reality you have. It literally maps where things are happening and why.
Conclusion
If I could go back to ’75, I would have signed that order to close the beaches. I would have listened to the guy who knew sharks, not the guys who knew tourism.
Don’t be the Larry Vaughn of your industry. You spent millions collecting geospatial data. You have the map. You have the coordinates. Don’t wait until the shark comes up and bites a hole in the bottom of your boat to start paying attention to it.
Stay safe, and check your maps.
Larry Vaughn is a fictional character from the 1975 Jaws motion picture. Merry Christmas Everyone !