This Fall, USF Business Students Will Read The Alignment Myth

Shameless book promotion but still a super cool thing.

A screenshot showed up in my inbox this week that I want to share with my subscribers and readers. I thought it was super cool.

My recently released book The Alignment Myth is not only now available on Amazon, it can also be found on the syllabus as required reading for two courses this fall: Data Wrangling & Digital Analysis and Data Mining for Business. The professor who made the call, George Williams, teaches data science. But the courses themselves sit in the University of San Francisco’s School of Management.

That distinction matters more than it looks. A computer science adoption would say “technical people find this credible.” A business school adoption says something different: future managers and analysts need this to do their jobs.

The students in these seats aren’t headed to the frontier labs to building new models. They’re headed to the enterprises where AI plans get accepted or rejected, where a dashboard’s confidence score gets mistaken for accuracy, and where AI adoption gets mistaken for AI transformation. They are, in other words, exactly the humans the book is about — the ones steering design, incentives, and infrastructure, whether they realize it or not.

I wrote The Alignment Myth because the important thing to me wasn’t about AI, or even the humans, but the space in between, where the intersection keeps misaligning. AI’s failures mostly get blamed on the model or the user, when the real story is almost always a misalignment somewhere in the human systems around the machine. Watching a business analytics program treat that argument as something worth teaching, before these students ever set foot in a company, is about the best validation I could ask for.

Grateful to USF, and to Professor Williams, for making the call.

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George Campbell is the author of The Alignment Myth: Why AI Feels Right but Gets Things Wrong, available now. He writes at thealignmentmyth.substack.com and can be found on X at @AlignmentMythAI.