This is the second summer in a row that the AI circus has taken no break.
OpenAI and Anthropic are tripping over each other with new models, claims and deals, whilst gearing up for their mega-IPO. Anthropic is telling investors that its Total Addressable Market amounts to more than 30,000 billion dollars. Roughly the entire US economy.
We’ve gradually ended up in AIbsurdistan squared.
But behind all the hype, hyperbole and mind-boggling valuations lies a more fundamental question. Now that the holidays are over and business leaders are starting to prepare their budgets for 2027, it’s becoming particularly concrete: what will work look like in the future?
Who do we still need to recruit? What skills do we need? Which jobs will disappear? And that question is perhaps even more important for the thousands of students who are starting a course this month to train for a profession that may have changed beyond recognition by the time they graduate.
I immersed myself in that question this summer. The range of answers is fascinatingly broad.
On the one hand, there is Paul Cheek from MIT Sloan. His new book has a brilliant title: *No One Works Here*. Cheek describes the ultimate AI-native enterprise: AI agents are making more and more decisions and carrying out more and more processes, meaning fewer and fewer people are needed to build ever-larger companies. Silicon Valley has been dreaming for years of the first one-person unicorn: a single entrepreneur who builds a billion-dollar company using AI. Cheek takes it a step further. *No One Works Here*.
On the other side is Sarah O’Connor of the Financial Times. In ‘We Are Not Machines’, she explores the history of labour and technology. The Industrial Revolution made people more productive, but at the same time reduced millions of people to mere cogs in gigantic machines. Charlie Chaplin in *Modern Times*: a man who no longer operates the machine, but whose body and rhythm are dictated by it. O’Connor’s uncomfortable question: are we going to make that mistake again with AI? Especially when Demis Hassabis of Google DeepMind predicts that AI could be ten times bigger than the Industrial Revolution — and perhaps ten times faster.
But the best book I read this summer on that question is by Cory Doctorow.Doctorow is a delightfully in-your-face enfant terrible of the tech sector and a sharp critic of Big Tech. His latest book is called *The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI*. For that title alone, he deserves an award. We know the centaur from Greek mythology: human from the waist up, horse from the waist down. It’s a brilliant metaphor for technology: humans decide where they want to go, whilst the horse provides speed, power and stamina. That’s where I believe AI is at its best. The doctor who, thanks to AI, spots patterns more quickly, but retains control over the diagnosis and responsibility. The programmer who uses AI to write code more quickly, thereby gaining more time for architecture and quality.
But Doctorow warns against the opposite: the Reverse Centaur. Turn the creature upside down. The machine is on top. The human is at the bottom. It is not the human who uses the machine. The machine uses the human.
Think of a warehouse worker with a scanner. An algorithm determines where he must go, which parcel he must pick up, how many seconds he is given to do so, and where he must go next. His hands and legs carry out what the software has decided. Not a human enhanced by technology, but a human actuator for an algorithm.
We are going to see both phenomena at the same time. Thanks to AI, some people will gain superpowers. A single person will be able to do what used to require ten people. Their autonomy, creativity and impact will increase: Centaurs. But others will find themselves in organisations where algorithms determine what they do, when they do it, how quickly and whether it was good enough: Reverse centaurs. That is why we need to reflect on this today. In our businesses, our society, but above all in our education system.
Which courses teach people to steer, assess, question and correct technology? Which skills keep humans at the top? Critical thinking. Creativity. Judgement. Empathy. Craftsmanship. The ability to formulate a problem rather than merely carrying out a task.
And which courses still prepare people for work that may soon be broken down into hundreds of small tasks dictated by an algorithm?
I remain an absolute believer in the centaur. In technology that makes us stronger without taking the reins. In AI that enhances our human capabilities rather than optimising away our humanity. But I fear that, at the same time, we will also create a great many ‘reverse centaurs’.
Perhaps that will become the most important task of the AI era: ensuring that humans remain in the saddle.
Peter Hinssen is a well-known Belgian technology entrepreneur, author, investor and international keynote speaker. He is regarded worldwide as one of the leading experts in the fields of innovation, leadership and the impact of technology on business.
This column previously appeared in the financial newspaper De Tijd
