Most Advanced Yet Acceptable

How Raymond Loewy's 1951 design principle explains your relationship with AI — and where your blind spots are hiding.

This is Empathy Elevated - your weekly guide and shortcut to mastering emotional intelligence through the power of empathy. Last week, I wrote What the Room Decides Before the Results Come In

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Emotional Intelligence • Stoicism • Human–AI Partnership

Practical frameworks for clearer communication, better judgment, and less friction in modern work.

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Today’s guest post comes from Johnny Nguyen , writer of the

Venture Out Substack. His writing is about living intentionally, and not the productivity-hack version. He writes from his experience of raising two kids, holding down a career, and still being present through it all. Johnny is a seasoned executive and leader who writes the way you would talk to a smart friend over coffee.

Picture of Johnny Nguyen

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Raymond Loewy named it in 1951. You’ve been obeying it without noticing.

Think of the last catchy song that lodged in your head. It pulled off what every commercial product strives to do: it got inside without scaring the bejeezus out of you. That’s MAYA.

Coined by Raymond Loewy, MAYA means Most Advanced Yet Acceptable, and Loewy was its master. He designed the Greyhound bus, the Shell logo, and the Coca-Cola fountain dispenser, and landed on the cover of Time in 1949 — where I think he bears an uncanny resemblance to Tony Stark.

He introduced the term in his 1951 memoir, Never Leave Well Enough Alone, explaining how a product gets sticky by threading a perfect needle in the consumer’s mind. We’re pulled two ways at once — toward novelty (neophilia) and away from it (neophobia). The buyer wants the most advanced thing, right up to the point it scares them. The designer’s job is to push to that exact threshold and stop, not to build the best possible product.

Image created by Colette Molteni through Storyblocks for Empathy Elevated

The Uncanny Valley Has an Address, and You Live Near It

AI fits the law perfectly. Every frontier model leads to a mix of awe and skepticism. Masahiro Mori saw it coming in 1970, describing how, as a robot grows more humanlike, we like it more — until it gets too close, and affection curdles into revulsion. He called it the uncanny valley. When it comes to AI, that valley is met by people like you. You’re the first to try the new thing and the first to decide whether it’s embraced or feared.

I remember NotebookLM’s debut in late 2023. To test it, I fed it a few of my writings and my LinkedIn profile. It produced a 15-minute podcast featuring two AI hosts discussing me. It was so eerie that I ran to my wife and had her listen to it, and she congratulated me on being featured on a show! Then I told her it was all fake. Today I generate them without a second thought and barely listen — a research assistant with a podcaster’s voice, running in the background of my commute.

Habituation Is Not the Same as Wisdom

Here’s what’s happening in the background: we get used to things fast. Mere exposure erodes away the novelty. Constant exposure becomes habituation. Of course, Anthropic and OpenAI will introduce more powerful models. Every once in a while, a new model will shock us, like Mythos or DeepSeek, but they, too, will become yet another option in a dropdown list of AI models we can choose from.

So before the next one arrives, three techniques for you, not your technology stack.

Image created by Colette Molteni through Storyblocks for Empathy Elevated

Three Things to Check Before the Next Model Drops

Scrutinize your shortcuts. Adoption of something that saves you an hour might be hiding a pitfall you never knew was there. Worse yet, the shortcut never lets you question what’s been cut. But, both Space Shuttle accident investigations, Challenger in 1986 and Columbia in 2003, point to the same failure: normalization of deviance, the slow creep where not questioning becomes the standard, right up to the catastrophe. I watched the before-and-after, and it’s as unsettling as it sounds.

Scrutinize your trust. You’re smart enough to spot AI hallucinations and proud of it. But notice which answer you wave through without checking: the clean one. The agreeable yet confident, well-formatted, and worded in your tone. That’s processing fluency, where we read “easy to process” as “true.” But, are you smart enough to know when to disagree or let the machine grade its own homework? Polish is the one thing a language model manufactures on demand. Trust the fluent answer, and the machine is grading its own exam, with your signature at the bottom.

Scrutinize your pride. As early adopters, we pride ourselves on staying up to date on the tech and news surrounding it. We identify as early adopters, wearing it as a badge of honor. But, by constantly adopting the next shiny object because that’s what we expect of ourselves, we don’t pause long enough to question if it’s worthy of adoption.

Image created by Colette Molteni through Storyblocks for Empathy Elevated

Those two podcast AI hosts still talk on my commute, lifeless and completely acceptable. I don’t think of them as advanced anymore, only acceptable. Somewhere the line moved, and it wasn’t the models that moved it. It was me. It was you.

So where’s your line now — and are you sure you set it there? Or did you just stop noticing it slide?

And your tech stack isn’t the only place where you have a line.