THROUGH THE COMPUTER SCREEN – Glinda’s Question – Journey Through AI Oz (3 of 3)

AI Built a Beautiful Thing
Then Glinda Asks *
(* The Perfect Question)

Revelation Without Purpose

The curtain came down on a Thursday.

Not dramatically. No one pulled it. It fell the way these things usually fall — someone ran the wrong prompt, the systems returned something unexpected, and for a moment the mechanism was visible. Not broken. Just visible. Levers, pulleys, a great deal of confident presentation.

The Wizard was standing behind it.

He was not malicious. He was not incompetent. He was a man who had built impressive systems and had been operating them with considerable skill. The smoke was real smoke. The voice was genuinely loud. The outputs were spectacular.

He had simply been so focused on the mechanism that he had not paused to ask what it was for.

In the original story Glinda appears at the end. She does not fix anything. She does not dismantle the systems or expose the Wizard or rescue anyone. She asks one question:

What was it you actually wanted?

Dorothy says she wants to go home.

Glinda tells her she could always go home. The shoes were there the whole time.

The journey was real. The lion got courage. The Scarecrow got a diploma. The tin man got a heart. The road was built and traveled and the destination was reached.

But Dorothy could have gone home on day one.

The question Glinda asks is not cruel. It is the only question that matters. And it is the question nobody thought to ask at the beginning — before the road was built, before the monkeys were dispatched, before the curtain went up.

What did you actually want?

The systems we have built are extraordinary. They think at scale. They execute without friction. They produce analysis, content, outreach, code, strategy — fast, clean, formatted for the eleven o’clock meeting. The curtain has been pulled back on some of it and the mechanism is visible now. That part does not change what they can do.

What they cannot do is answer Glinda’s question.

They can generate a purpose. They can produce a mission statement, a strategy deck, a five-year roadmap with color-coded priorities. They will make them look exactly right. But the intent has to come from somewhere else — from the person standing in front of the curtain, or behind it, before any of the machinery starts.

There is no Dorothy in this story.

That is not a complaint about the technology. The technology is remarkable. That is an observation about what happens when capability arrives before clarity. The road gets built. The analysis gets presented. The agents execute flawlessly. And somewhere in the middle of all of it, quietly, the original question gets deferred — confirmed later, once the systems are running.

Later keeps arriving. The question is still waiting.

Glinda is not a character in most conversations about AI. Nobody is building her into the systems. She does not scale. She appears at the end in a good dress and asks the thing everyone was avoiding, and the answer was available the whole time.

I have been writing this field report across three days. I have described the diploma, the road, and the curtain. I have implicated myself in each of them — the analysis I commissioned, the monkeys I dispatched, the mechanism I operated with considerable confidence.

Glinda’s question lands on me too.

I am also, as it happens, still the Wizard.

Logic to Apply

The systems are complete. The capability is real. The question is still yours.

Before the road gets built — before the agents fly, before the analysis arrives pre-formatted for the meeting — ask the one question Glinda asks.

What do you actually want?

The shoes were always there. The answer has to come from you.

The field report is complete. The Wizard steps away from the curtain.

Editor’s Note: The Flying Monkeys (the AIs) took great glee in this trilogy. One even commented “they blame us, when it was always them”.

Editor’s Note 2: Glinda knew the shoes were always there. You just needed to know where you wanted to go — and start walking.