This is about what happens in the wake of AI – when the career ladder disappears, intelligence is no longer scarce, and the scoreboard no longer responds. It’s about the questions that follow, and the places I’ve started looking for answers.
The Fall … and Three Questions
We were raised in a world where the brain reigned supreme. Physical labor had already been replaced by machines that didn’t exist 50 years earlier. It’s happening again, but now it’s coming for our minds. And once you see it happening, it gets really uncomfortable.
My mother, a refugee from cold-war Hungary – said something that served me well for decades: “The one thing they can never take from you is your education” – so I followed my undergraduate degree with a law degree. I played the game. What mattered was intelligence – doing well in school, getting into the right college, landing a good job, climbing the professional ladder.
And she was right. For decades. But maybe not anymore. Maybe what I took for a Truth isn’t advice that I can pass on to my daughters.
The game of intellectual meritocracy was the best trade you could make in the 20th century, if you had a college degree and some ambition. We were led to believe that success was measurable on our scoreboard of grades, titles, income, achievement – and if we optimized for these things, we won the game.
I proudly passed the exam, closed the big deal, got the title, … you know the drill. You probably did too.
But now I fear it’s over. And I have no idea what to make of it. I want to keep working; but what do I have – two years? Maybe? I’m just not sure how long the world I understand will exist–
As I write this in early 2025 we’re already living in a world where machines can outperform people at the tasks that used to define careers. AI is writing business plans, generating photo-realistic media, holding real-time conversations, writing code, and replacing legal work. The rest is next.
This isn’t theoretical. It’s just unevenly distributed, which is why you may not feel it as acutely as I do. If I weren’t running an AI startup, I might not see it either. If I wasn’t in the thick of it, I too might be one of those who boldly say “I’ve used AI, it’s not there. We’re safe.”
Remember when cell phones were useless bricks – until one day, they were everywhere. I was one of those weird people on this “Internet” thing, and 10 years later so was everyone I knew.
I feel the ladder we climbed is getting unsteady. But I’ve also had hundreds of conversations over the last year, and the vast majority of people don’t see it. (Am I early or crazy? Is there a difference?)
If you’re a skeptic – I bet you at least see AI gnawing at the edges. It went from parlor trick, to mildly useful helper, to replacing the need to do a lot of writing in 18 months. 18 months.
Just remember that none of us are good at thinking in exponentials. They’re sneaky. It’s not there, then it’s everywhere –
Play with me for a minute, especially if you’re a skeptic.
You’ve seen that in 18 months commercially available AI has gone from “this sucks” to “it can do research papers.” In about the same time, Alphafold had done something that the world’s top minds hadn’t been able to crack for 50 years – it predicted structures for nearly all known proteins.
I’m not being a doomer here. I’m not saying people have no place in the future, and that the robots will make us into their slaves or batteries a la Matrix.
Last month my daughter asked what careers she should consider. She’s seventeen. Telling her that I believe every career path my generation followed will be upended would be cruel.
But the reality, as I see it – no ladder is safe. Not yours. Not your kids’. The old scoreboard is gone. And until we admit that, we can’t even begin to ask the right questions.
With the countdown now running on exponential time, I’ve started asking very different questions than I was two years ago.
Q: If the scoreboard is broken, and we can’t climb, what now?
After law school, I spent months of my life studying for the Bar Exam. Then I moved states, and had to do it again. Hundreds of hours invested. It was the next rung in my ladder climb – get the title “Attorney at Law,” and move on to chase partnership in a law firm. The next title, the next income bracket.
It’s already old news, but I’m a dinosaur – in 2023 GPT-4 passed the bar exam, scoring in the 90th percentile. The only thing preventing code from being called “Esq.” is the legalized monopoly of the legal profession. (Can GPT-4 actually do the job of a lawyer in complex situations? Not fully, yet, but despite what AI-illiterate lawyers think we’re damn close.)
The point isn’t one about whether or not people will ‘elevate’ themselves to do more complex work with the help of machines (which I am not convinced of in the long term, but will tackle that another time), but it’s about what does it mean when the imprimatur of our scoreboard doesn’t give us the internal satisfaction and external status it once did.
Now that I know that a robot can pass the bar exam … it’s just not so special. The same for most academic pursuits. The robots are here, and what happens when they’re better at it than not just mediocre me, but any and all of us?
The existing order gave people a sense of progress. The ladder was personal compass and social glue. Without it, we’re floating in subjectivity.
What game are we playing now? Is most of what we’re striving towards now just performative? What if it won’t matter in three years?
We’re still close enough to the old model to believe the game is real. But if our eyes are open to technology, we’ve seen too much to pretend it will still work.
Q: If intelligence isn’t rare anymore, what becomes valuable?
Our species told itself our brains raised us above the “lower animals.” We could think – make tools, make plans, build economies and societies. I’ve spent my life reducing uncertainty. Making things predictable, stable. First for myself, then for my family. That’s what ‘intelligence’ let me do.
What do we do when we hand over the keys to something smarter, faster, and stronger than we are? When it has the brains and brawn that no human does. It will be able do better than I can at what matters, protecting my kin.
And the world I understood to deploy my own skills for the only end that matters won’t exist. I’d be powerless to fight entropy myself because there’s something better than me, than all of us.
No clean answers – just recursive questions.
Q: How do I raise my daughters for the future, when the road I followed leads to nowhere?
Most parents still think the future will rhyme with the 20th century. Their self-worth measured on their kids’ performance on the scoreboard of their time.
Play along – even if you’re not sold that tomorrow will be radically different from today.
What do we think the world will really look like in five years – when my daughter graduates college? 18 months ago you hadn’t heard of A.I., now it’s such a threat to the academic order that most schools are banning it.
What do you think the ladder of career success looks like when there’s an A.I. employee available for the same job as your child. It’s smarter, costs pennies, works 24×7, doesn’t have messy HR issues, and can be cloned an infinite number of times for free.
How can I believe our children will have a career anything like ours? Our scoreboards aren’t just outdated. They’re irrelevant.
The one thing we know is – we don’t know, and we can’t know. But it’s our responsibility as parents to think about what might be next. It feels overwhelming, but it’s not hopeless. In my business, I’ve learned to pivot when markets shift – this is like that, but for parenting. Sometimes you have to toss the old model to find the new one. If only I knew what the new one is.
These questions don’t have easy answers, but here’s where I’m starting.
The Search for Ground Truth
We don’t (yet) have answers, but I start with a framework
To find answers – if there are any – I start with “what do I believe to be true?” then build from there. You might not agree with all of them. Some might seem irrelevant at first. They aren’t. I might even change them over time in the spirit of strong opinions, weakly held.
Here’s the scaffolding:
When machines can do it all, we still have something that’s our own
When the machines are better at doing, thinking, and even mimicking feeling – what’s still ours? What can AI never replace and where we are still in charge?
In your business, it’s the vision only you bring. At home, the values you pass to your kids.
It’s our ability to make decisions that are meaningful to us. Without the old ladder of titles or paychecks, the yardstick becomes internal. I call it ‘sovereignty of consciousness’ – not a philosophical slogan, just a reminder that meaning starts and ends with us. It’s what makes our decisions still ours. Even if a machine can mimic you, it’s not you. We make meaning from our experience, and something else copying it doesn’t change it for you.
Of course, that leaves us with a different mess of what that ‘reality’actually means (I’ll get to ground truth in a moment) – but it’s a starting point for redefining our scoreboard, and I’ll explore how to make it practical in future writings.
The scoreboard is broken, but we need a scoreboard
As our ladder-climbing scoreboard breaks, we’ll feel a sense of loss. Who we were, and how we measured ourselves, doesn’t matter anymore.
But we’re not really missing the ladder. We’re missing having a scoreboard. Something that grounds us in who we are, how we compare ourselves to other simians in the tribe, how we might challenge ourselves.
For those of us running businesses, it’s like realizing taking profits today isn’t enough if the business is dying. We’re not just missing the ladder; we’re craving a way to know we’re winning.
Maybe it’s about character, honesty, courage, grit. But whatever it is, it needs measuring, because without a scoreboard, we’re lost.
As shared truth collapses, we become tribal
In just the last few years, truth has become subjective. Two political camps have radically different beliefs about what is real and what is not.
Blair Warren’s truth about persuasion has been weaponized at the societal level: “People will do anything for those who encourage their dreams, justify their failures, allay their fears, confirm their suspicions, and help them throw rocks at their enemies.”
The modern nation-state is a historical anomaly, albeit a useful one. Our natural state is tribal. To navigate society’s future pragmatically, we must understand tribalism – and how it’s been twisted.
Digital communication has accelerated our fragmentation (visit the darkest recesses of Reddit or 4Chan and see how much). AI will accelerate this even further – creating belief bubbles not just by group, but down to the individual. Your own personal tribe of one.
As our natural state, tribalism isn’t going away. As AI weaves and worms itself into every aspect of life, we need to understand it. This will be fundamental to our future, and that of our children.
Our moral substrate must be grounded in something real
With a scoreboard collapsing, truth becoming relative, and an uncertain future, the only things we can be certain of are the laws of nature. We should find an anchor from first principles, and ground ourselves in the laws of thermodynamics. That is, things that must be true, even as everything else becomes subjective.
Why?
All human systems are gamed, optimized, or unstable. AI becomes the trickster, rewriting reality faster than we can verify it. What remains that is incorruptible – and can keep us from becoming lost in subjectivity because our external yardsticks are gone?
Bear with me here – this might sound out there at first, but it’s not a detour. I’ll dig into this more in future posts, because I think it’s central to where we’re headed.
Strange as it will seem, this grounding exists in a sixteen year old protocol. Once data (whether that’s speech, proof of the fact that we are human and not an AI, or transactions) is written to it, it’s immutable. It’s amoral, apolitical, and completely indifferent to what anyone believes.
It’s the Bitcoin protocol, better known for its ‘number go up’ financial aspect. But ignore that for a moment, what it can (and I think, will) do is far deeper. It’s a way for independent actors, each operating in their own self-interest, to cooperate for mutual benefit. To secure cooperation with energy (the network uses energy to create certainty). In other words, this network is a way to trust and verify, whether you’re dealing with a man or a machine. The byproduct is a technology that solves one of the problems we face – how can we know something is true.
We’ll need systems that don’t depend on belief. Systems that don’t care who – or what – is on the other end of the wire.
I know this raises more questions than answers right now. Stick with me, and I’ll unpack why this ties back to AI and meaning.
Be not afraid, we go together
I hope I’m wrong about the fall. I don’t have answers. It would be much easier to put my ladder back on the wall, start climbing again, beckoning for my girls to follow.
But nostalgia won’t make a better future for them.
What will is navigating the uncharted waters of mankind, machines, money … and meaning.
This is the start. I don’t know where it goes. But I’m paying attention – and if you are too, let’s keep going.
“Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.”
– Ferris Bueller
The future isn’t waiting. But maybe, if we pay attention, we won’t miss what’s worth saving – or what’s worth building next.
