My sons are still very young, and neither of them will touch a keyboard for years. But I think about the world they are going to inherit every day. One of the real reasons I started Ascentis AI was to understand this new world properly, so that when their time comes I can help them find their place in it rather than fear it on their behalf.
I have been watching graduates boo speaker after speaker for the crime of mentioning AI during their graduation, one of them telling the room to “deal with it”. I understand the fear underneath that. It worries me too, and I would be lying if I said otherwise. It even worries the big AI companies, some of which now ask for help to slow the race they are running.
Engaged, not resigned
I have decided to be deliberately engaged with it rather than watch from the side with a worried eye, hoping it leaves the world I know so well untouched. Because, honestly, it will not. So I would rather walk into it with my boys than pretend it is not coming. And if the conclusion turns out to be “you need to learn plumbing or painting”, then so be it.
The part no model can reach
The part I keep coming back to is the part no model can reach.
- The judgment to tell when the data is right, but the situation still feels wrong.
- The nerve to ask what nobody else has thought to ask.
- Being reinvented three or four times over the course of a life, and staying yourself through it.
None of that is going to be obsolete. If anything, it becomes the whole thing. When the mechanical parts of a job are handled by a machine, what is left is exactly the human judgment that was always the point.
It is also, quietly, how I think about building AI for other people’s businesses. The systems we build at Ascentis AI are meant to take the low-value work off people so they can spend more of their day on the judgment only they can bring, not to replace that judgment.
That is what I would want my sons to hear one day, instead of “deal with it”. If you have young children too, what is the one thing you most want them to hold on to?