The Great Refinement

The word “we” is powerful, and it’s dangerous. We the people. We hold these truths to be self-evident. Foundational, uniting language. The trouble is that “we” doesn’t work with responsibility. When “we” is responsible, no one is.

We have built, for ourselves and others, a mountain of digital toil. It sits in our inboxes. It sits in our queues. We slog through it every day, because we own it. Humans wedged in as the integration point. Humans inserted to provide “judgement” where no judgement was ever needed. Virtual go-betweens that feel like value, and aren’t. We churn out of necessity, because there aren’t enough hours in the day to keep up with every spinning plate.

This era is ending. The era of AI is the great refinement of what is essentially human.

We is where accountability goes to die. Status meetings. Approval chains. CCs. “Looping in.” “Circling back.” Each one is we in disguise. The toil mountain didn’t build itself. We built it, one diffused decision at a time, because diffusion was the point. If no one explicitly owns it, no one is exposed.

AI lays this bare. When an agent can do the punt-work in seconds, the punt itself becomes the visible artifact. The virtual go-between, exposed, generates only delay. Once the delay is free to remove, refusing to remove it is a choice with a name on it.

The essential human. What’s left after the refinement is the work that only a human can own. Judgement. Accountability. Taste. The tough call. Compassion. The human connection. That’s the part we must do. That’s the part AI cannot. The principle is less, but better. Applied to what humans do.

Everything else has to go. The digital toil is something AI can either accelerate or do for us outright. Facing that reality is scary. Individuals have to face it. Organizations have to face it. It’s an “I” problem and a “We” problem.

Start with the “I”. My own personal freak-out moment.

It was a rainy day in March 2023, cool, the first wisps of spring in the air. I had just watched a demo of the “new” version of GitHub Copilot. At the time it was called Copilot X. This was different. Much more than fancy autocomplete. It was gaining sophistication fast. I had spent my career becoming an expert in software, architecture, languages. This thing could do it in seconds. It was still primitive compared to what we have today, but I saw where things were headed and it shook me to my core. Fear. Lizard brain. Fight or flight. Livelihood. For myself and my team.

I had been through technical reinvention several times in my career. VB6. .NET. Mobile. Web. Cloud. AI was different. I had to work through all five stages of grief with this one. Technology had nothing to do with the fight. This was an identity crisis. You spend a technology cycle clocking your 10K hours to become an expert, then you watch a model do it better in seconds.

It was humbling.

Working through it was working through fear. Not a justified fear. A felt one. The fear that without the work that was valued, the worth of the job evaporates. With AI, that fear isn’t isolated to one department or one worker. It runs through the whole company. So the toil gets defended. Sometimes by the worker. Sometimes by the manager. Sometimes by the whole structure around them. What looks like prudence is preservation in disguise.

This is the challenge the individual faces, and it takes strong leadership to navigate. The refinement is something everyone has to go through. Leaders have to go first. Name what is essentially human for them, in their role, and then lead others through the same journey. You can’t do it from a place of fear. The lizard brain isn’t going to cut it. Get the prefrontal cortex engaged. Move into a learning mindset. A beginner’s mindset.

Find the work behind the toil. Find the actual outcome. Get to it in a fraction of the time and a fraction of the effort. Higher quality. Lower cost. All at once. When that happens, you realize they lost nothing. They gained. Satisfaction. Insight. Time to do the things they always wished they could do but never had the budget or the hours for. The value was never in carrying the toil. The value is in force multiplying and compounding.

I’ve been on this journey with myself since that rainy day in March. With my teams. With my family. Three years later, it is still humbling. It is also exhilarating.

Code is cheap now. The toil around it is about to be too. What is left to defend, defend hard. What is left to let go, let go honestly. The delay is free to remove. Refusing to remove it is a choice with a name on it.