Sign in Subscribe

Topic

Human judgment

Where people still decide, and what it takes to keep it that way: the editions on work, labour and the judgment AI does not replace.

The transfer of judgment to machines did not happen as a break. It happened as a reduction of friction, one decision at a time, and as a ladder that stopped being rebuilt. These editions follow where people still decide, and what it costs to keep it that way.

Start with this

Who Controls AI? Part 2 9 April 2026. From "do this" to "what should I do?". About half of the interactions in a large study of ChatGPT use were requests for a decision, not a task, and the edition names the mechanism: an output that is clear, structured and assertive is read as reliable, whatever it understands. Deference by aesthetics, adopted through imitation before anyone decided it.

The path

  1. You can't read AI's mind, but AI can read yours 13 November 2025. The asymmetry: the model translates your intent perfectly, while the reasoning it shows you is a narrative reconstruction that can be incomplete, distorted or invented. More than forty researchers from four rival labs said so together.
  2. Who Controls AI? Part 2 9 April 2026. Judgment outsourced through continuity, not decision, at the individual level and then inside organisations, where competition amplifies it.
  3. Layoffs Are the Headline. Hiring Collapse Is the Story 12 March 2026. The five companies whose cuts dominated the news all grew their headcount over the period, by their own filings. Oracle's cuts are a balance-sheet story told in the language of automation. What moves is substitution, not collapse.
  4. Layoffs Make Noise. Hiring Stops in Silence. 19 March 2026. Europe does not fire for AI; it stops hiring and lets turnover work. Klarna cut its workforce almost in half in three years without a redundancy. A hiring freeze needs no provision and no consultation and makes no headline, and the position the graduate applies for was never advertised.
  5. Nobody Pays Programmers for Code 9 July 2026. Programming labour is priced by proximity to revenue, control and liability, in three layers, and the layer that executes bounded tasks is the one that gets compressed. Hire for systems thinking, problem decomposition and the navigation of abstraction, not for fluency.
  6. When Execution Becomes Callable 20 August 2026. Between 2023 and 2025, US employment for programmers fell by more than a quarter and for software developers by almost nothing, in the figures the edition cites. The forecast: a company built around direction, coherence, taste, context and accountability, which runs on senior judgment and no longer builds it. It works for exactly one generation.

Further along the same line

What changed

November 2025 established the asymmetry: the model reads you, and what it shows of its reasoning is a reconstruction. March 2026 separated what was happening in the labour market from what the headlines said: no mass replacement, and a hiring pipeline closing without a sound. April named the mechanism at the level of the person and of the organisation: judgment handed over through continuity, not decision. July priced judgment in one market, programming. August made the forecast and stated what would refute it. The question the series leaves open is where judgment will come from once the junior work that used to produce it is gone.

Questions to take into a meeting

  • Which decisions in our company are now formulated by a model before a person sees them, and who decided that? Not who approved it: who decided.
  • Where is human review mandatory, where is sampling enough, and how do exceptions surface? If this is not written down, quality will not degrade. It will collapse.
  • What did we stop hiring for this year, and what will we be unable to promote into in five?
  • When a model's answer conflicts with an experienced person's judgment, what does our process do, and what does it reward?
  • Are we screening for fluency, or for the three signals: systems thinking, problem decomposition, navigating abstraction?
Language