What AI can never replace

The benefits of AI are immense. Unparalleled efficiency. Speed. Convenience. But every advantage carries a price tag. And I believe AI is a perfect example.

AI can radically simplify our lives (and I use it often), yet at the same time, it threatens to erode the very foundation of trust — trust in information, trust in institutions, and even trust in one another.

In the knowledge work age, your value was often measured by your IQ. But as Kevin Kelly argues, in the age of AI, the more critical metric is shifting. What matters most is no longer just intelligence, but what he calls the Trust Quotient — the ability to be authentic and develop trust in a world where machines can imitate almost everything else.

“Trust is a broad word that will be unbundled as it seeps into the AI ecosystem,” Kelly writes. “Part security, part reliability, part responsibility, and part accountability, these strands will become more precise as we synthesize it and measure it. Trust will be something we’ll be talking a lot more about in the coming decade.”

Key quote: “Right now, AIs own no responsibilities. If they get things wrong, they don’t guarantee to fix it. They take no responsibility for the trouble they may cause with their errors. In fact, this difference is currently the key difference between human employees and AI workers. The buck stops with the humans. They take responsibility for their work; you hire humans because you trust them to get the job done right. If it isn’t, they redo it, and they learn how to not make that mistake again. Not so with current AIs. This makes them hard to trust.”

Inside the science of teaching

While Kelly is making the case that trust will define the human edge, Joe Liemandt is betting on something else. On the Invest Like the Best podcast, host Patrick O’Shaughnessy spoke with the software billionaire who walked away from the spotlight to reinvent schooling.

Liemandt believes AI tutors can help kids master academics in just two hours a day. The rest of their time goes to workshops on leadership, entrepreneurship, and teamwork — skills no algorithm can replicate.

If Kelly is right, the future belongs to those we can trust. If Liemandt is right, it belongs to kids who love learning so much they beg to skip summer break.

Key quote: “My favorite analogy is the sciences. Biology, chemistry, and physics. Let’s take those. They had their days of wandering in the wilderness, where doctors were still bloodletting and chemists were blowing themselves up. And then there was an invention of an instrument, the microscope for biology and the telescope for physics and the analytical balance for chemistry, that allowed more precise measurement. And that precise measurement is what allowed those sciences to really take off. And so learning science has sort of been that way. It’s in this wilderness period for 40 years where we still have teachers in front of the classroom — and it’s just a bad model. Teachers are great. But a teacher in front of the classroom is the problem. The model is the issue.”

OUTLAST field notes: On the poverty of the word “work”

In English, we flatten so much into that one word: work.

A task to be done. Hours to be logged. Labor in exchange for a paycheck. But as I’ve traveled through the world’s oldest companies, I keep realizing how inadequate that word feels for the things that truly endure.

At Eirakuya [cloth company] in Kyoto, employees don’t talk about “work.” They talk about shokunin — a lifelong devotion to practice and craft. At Beretta, shaping steel into a firearm meant to last generations is not “work” in the corporate sense; it’s a lineage of skill, passed hand to hand. At the Hōshi Ryokan, the daily rituals of preparing baths or meals resemble a kind of stewardship — something that has kept the inn alive for more than 1,300 years.

And I think of investing, too. Some of the best investors I’ve known never describe what they do as work — they speak of it as curiosity, discovery, or simply playing a game they can’t stop playing. And I’m lucky to feel this too about my own pursuits, too.

Seen this way, what lasts is never just work. It is practice, craft, ritual. It is tending something so that it can outlive you. Our language betrays us here: when we say “I’m going to work,” we imply drudgery, productivity, efficiency. But when we speak of practice or craft, we are already speaking a different language.

Maybe the first step in learning how to outlast is changing our vocabulary — finding better words for the things we hope will endure. Words that call us not to manage time or extract value, but to cultivate and to care. The oldest companies show us: they have never simply been working. They have been carrying on a conversation with time itself.

A few more links I enjoyed:

The Clash Of Two Gilded Ages – via Noema

Key quote: “‍Contrary to popular cultural tropes, America and China today are not caught in the “clash of civilizations.” Rather, as I earlier underscored in Foreign Affairs in July 2021, we’re witnessing a curious form of great power competition: the clash of two Gilded Ages. Both the U.S. and China confront sharp inequality, corruption or capture of state power by economic elites, and persistent financial risks to common people who have no way to indemnify themselves. Both are struggling to reconcile the tensions between capitalism and their respective political systems, albeit with greater intensity in China’s nominally communist system.”

Don’t Read the Book of Lies – via Tom Morgan

Key quote: “‍I have come to believe that the “spiritual” path isn’t just to be found passively on a meditation cushion (although that helps!). It’s found in the active pursuit of doing what you love in service of love. At least eighty percent of the people I now speak to are now in search of this path, and their primary obstacle is money. Which means a (surprisingly neglected) obstacle to spiritual growth is our relationship to money. This is because money is our closest energetic proxy for self-worth.”