You Can Outsource Intelligence. You Can't Outsource Understanding.

Andrej Karpathy (Tesla, OpenAI) said something recently that's been rattling around in my head.. something he found on X.

"You can outsource your thinking but you can't outsource your understanding."

I think about that a lot when people tell me we're all about to be out of jobs.

Here's the thing nobody's asking in that conversation..

Even if an AI is like 90% accurate on what you need.. that other 10% is the nuanced vision. The version that reflects your values, your priorities, your vision for the outcome. An AGI doesn't know what that looks like. Not precisely. Not the way YOU know it.

So you still have to show up. You still have to check in, verify alignment, course correct.

What do you call that? That's work. That's a job. You're improving the life of some other person by doing this thing.. I don't see things changing that much.

The frame I'd offer: you're not going to be replaced by AI.

You're going to be asked to do something more specifically human. Define the outcome. Stay invested in the result. Make judgment calls that a model can't make because it doesn't know what YOU value.

That's not a role that you can get rid of. It's the role that matters most.

Here's another way to look at it..

If you deploy a fully autonomous agent and it causes harm.. financial loss, legal exposure, something worse.. who owns that?

You do.

The accountability doesn't get outsourced with the intelligence. It stays with the human in the loop. Always.

So no, I don't think we're all going on vacation while the AIs handle everything.

I think we're going to keep doing what humans have always done.. solve problems for other humans.

The tools are just getting a lot more capable.

🚀

- James

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