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Friends,
I was flicking through channels looking for something to cancel. You know how it is. You’re paying for six streaming services and watching two of them. I don’t even get the two. My family has me hostage: one watches Disney+, the other watches Netflix, and I don’t end up watching anything because every time I start a crime drama I’m up until 2am and useless the next day. So I’ve given up on TV. And it certainly isn’t Mickey Mouse creating the level of addiction I worry about with my youngest. It’s some concocted, systematic, algorithmically primed show designed to keep teenagers scrolling. Streaming might be my generation’s version of social media. We just didn’t know it at the time.
Except I hadn’t given up on TV. Not really. Tempted by an empty lounge and a remote control, I landed on Hoarder SOS on Channel 4. One of those programmes where someone hasn’t thrown anything away since 1994, and there are newspapers stacked to the ceiling and a path worn through the middle of the living room. Unwashed plates. Bin bags full of things that should have gone out a decade ago. And maybe a mouse or 10. Properly grim. I watched for ten minutes with the comfortable superiority of someone who would never let that happen.
Then, still thinking about it as I went upstairs to bed, I stepped into my study and saw the drawer. That drawer.
The bottom drawer of the chest of drawers. The one that hasn’t been opened properly in years because something at the back is wedging it shut, papers bulging out of the front in a world where we shouldn’t be printing anything out anymore. Warranties for appliances older than my kids. Instruction manuals in French, German, and Chinese for devices I couldn’t identify even in English. The drawer that represents everything I haven’t dealt with because dealing with it means sitting on the floor and going through it, and going through it means confronting the fact that I’ve been keeping things I will never need again.
So I sat on the floor. At midnight. And I opened it.
I was there for over an hour. I got pins and needles because I hadn’t moved. I was sitting cross-legged surrounded by old folders, cables for devices that no longer exist, and USB sticks that turned out to be USB-A, which I can’t even plug into my laptop anymore. I’d actually bought a USB-A to USB-C converter for exactly this kind of situation, but I still didn’t want to waste my time on whatever was on them. Old files, probably. Maybe some embarrassing photos. And files I obviously haven’t needed in ten years. And a video camera with a mini CD in it that I think holds footage of my eldest daughter as a baby. I’m not sure. I didn’t have time to find out. The instruction manuals went straight in the bin. Why isn’t all of this stuff online only by now?
I could have stayed there all night and sorted all six drawers once and for all. But I was too scared to open drawer number two.
Somewhere in the extracted pile was a certificate. Cream paper, slightly yellowed, dog-eared at the corners. A logo from a training company I’m fairly sure went bust in 2003. It confirmed that I had completed an advanced Microsoft Office training course. Two days in a beige room with strip lighting, learning VLOOKUP, pivot tables, Visual Basic macros, and a thing called Microsoft Access that I have never once used in my professional life. Not once. I have no idea why I kept it. I put “Advanced Microsoft Office Suite” on my CV for years, right between my degree and my language skills, as though the ability to build a pivot table was a mark of human intelligence.
I was proud of it. We all were. Sometimes these certifications just prove that you showed up. I remember interviewing people who brought their certificates with them, almost like trophies. Here’s my proof that I sat in the room and completed the thing. Doesn’t mean they learned anything.
I looked at it for a long time. Then I put it in the recycling bin with the instruction manuals.
Because it hit me, sitting there with pins and needles in both legs, that the skill it certified was never really a skill at all. It was a workaround. A way of compensating for something a machine couldn’t yet do for itself.
I was the machine.
I just didn’t know it.
Just I
Before the knowledge economy, before the screens and the spreadsheets and the endless meetings, people worked with their hands, their voices, their judgment. A trader read the room. A craftsman felt when the wood was right. A teacher watched a child’s face and knew, without data, whether they understood. Intelligence was embodied, intuitive, human. It was I. Just I.
Think about someone who’s worked for fifty years and seen this whole arc. They started as I. They watched the offices arrive, the computers arrive, the processes multiply. They lived through the entire era of artificial intelligence, the human kind, and now they’re watching the world come full circle. Back to I. Some people were just I all along. They never let the machine change them. Most of us weren’t that lucky.
Then the office arrived. And with it, the computer. And with the computer, something nobody named at the time but that I think we can name now.
Artificially intelligent
We became artificially intelligent. And I don’t mean artificial intelligence, the technology. I mean us. Humans. We became artificially intelligent. We learned to perform a version of intelligence that wasn’t really ours.
The knowledge economy took the most creative, curious, emotionally intelligent species on the planet, sat us at desks, and trained us to behave like machines. We learned to process information in structured formats. We memorised keyboard shortcuts, even if it was only CNTRL-C, ALT TAB, CNTRL-SHIFT-ESC. We became fluent in file naming conventions. We knew whether it was .doc or .docx, and we were proud of knowing the difference.
We called this knowledge work. But most of it wasn’t knowledge. It was processing. We were the middleware. The API. The thing that sat between the spreadsheet and the slide deck, translating one into the other by hand.
The knowledge economy didn’t use our intelligence. It used our compliance.
And it paid us for it. We were given pay rises for being artificially intelligent. Promotions for being good at the process. Bonuses for executing faster, formatting better, complying more efficiently and going on courses to do this better. That’s what the machine of work wanted. It didn’t give us pay rises for being intelligent. It didn’t promote people for asking difficult questions, or for saying “this meeting doesn’t need to exist,” or for sitting with a problem until the real answer arrived. It promoted the people who made the board deck sing and hit the deadline and followed the process without complaint.
“I’m the person who can build the financial model.” “I’m the person who gets things done.” These weren’t human skills. They were machine skills performed by humans. And we were proud of them, the way I was proud of that certificate.
Perhaps this was the phase we needed to go through. Perhaps you can’t get to real intelligence without first passing through the artificial version. Perhaps thirty years of pretending was the apprenticeship, and the graduation ceremony is happening right now, whether we’re ready for it or not.
Just I, again
Now actual AI arrives. The silicon kind. And it can do all the artificial parts better than we ever could. It builds the model. It makes the deck. It formats, coordinates, schedules, and processes at a speed that makes thirty years of human effort look like a warm-up act. And it even codes.
And we’re terrified.
Not because AI is taking something valuable. But because it’s exposing how long ago we stopped doing the valuable thing.
The inquiries I’m getting right now aren’t “how do I use AI?” They’re “what do you think is going to happen?” People want a North Star. Nobody knows. There is no North Star. Not yet. Last year it was CEO memos. Tobi Lütke at Shopify telling employees that AI usage was a “fundamental expectation.” Meta writing AI into performance reviews. It became a mass rally cry. Those CEOs had a clear view of where the world was going. This year the memos have become reality. Perhaps we should have listened to them sooner.
When I wrote about Shumer and OpenClaw’s AI legislation last week, it was a moment where I had time to think about what this new world might actually be. Strip away the artificial, and what’s left? Just the I. The thinking, feeling, creating, deciding part that we haven’t properly exercised in years.
The skills that were never really ours
Andrej Karpathy, co-founder of OpenAI and former head of AI at Tesla, posted something in late December that should haunt every knowledge worker. He said he’d flipped from 80% manual coding to 80% AI-assisted coding in four weeks. He called it a “magnitude 9 earthquake.” And then: “I’ve never felt this much behind as a programmer.”
If it’s happening to Karpathy, the ladder is dissolving for everyone. Within weeks, Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux, admitted that AI-generated code was better than his own. These aren’t junior developers. These are the people who built the systems.
In early 2026, over 30,000 tech jobs were cut globally in two months. Coding bootcamps are closing. The half-life of a technical skill has dropped to around two and a half years. All those skills we spent decades acquiring? They were temporary. Workarounds. Gap-fillers until the real machines showed up. We just didn’t want to see it.
I was coding in C and Pascal at university, many years ago. Last century. I’m not sure anyone even knows what Pascal is anymore. I don’t think I ever used either in a real job. They were out of date almost as soon as I started using them. That’s the nature of technical skills. They were always temporary. We just pretended they were permanent because the rate of change was slow enough to maintain the illusion.
The rate of change is no longer slow enough.
The funny thing about skills is that we hoard them. We hoard the fact that we know them, because we spent time investing in them and letting go feels like waste. Remember when people put “good at Googling” on their CVs? Some people are putting “AI skills” on their CVs right now. In a few years we’ll laugh about that the same way, because AI will be so embedded in everything that listing it as a skill will be like listing “can use electricity.”
The certification racket
A friend of mine recently didn’t get a job. Not because he lacked experience. He had years of hands-on experience with AI tools, building with them daily. He didn’t get the job because he didn’t have a certificate. A formal AI certification. Eight thousand pounds. Mostly theoretical. The kind of programme where you learn frameworks and pass an exam, and then the thing you learned about has been updated three times before you’ve framed the certificate.
He did the course. He got the certificate. By the time he had it, half of what it covered was already outdated. There was no practicality in applied decision-making. Just uploading information that we probably will forget after a few days, or even hours.
This is the certification racket. The same trick the knowledge economy has been playing for thirty years, just with higher stakes and shorter shelf lives. A piece of paper proves you can do the thing. The certificate is the skill.
It was never the skill. Perhaps I should have ripped up my degree certificate while I was at it. It’s still in a drawer somewhere, and I’m not sure what it proves anymore except that I once spent three years learning things I’ve since had to unlearn.
Tobi Lütke didn’t ask his Shopify employees to get certified. He asked them to use the tools and show results. One rewards the paper. The other rewards the practice.
It’s time to unlearn
Not reskilling. Not upskilling. Unlearning. Letting go of skills, habits, and identities that no longer serve you. It sounds simple. It isn’t.
I caught myself last month spending forty minutes formatting a document before a keynote that I could have handed to AI in thirty seconds. I knew I could delegate it. I chose not to, because formatting that document felt like work, and handing it to a machine felt like cheating. That’s hoarding. Clinging to a competency that has expired because the alternative means admitting the ground has moved.
Unlearning is harder than learning. Learning feels like growth. Unlearning feels like loss. The person who spent twenty years becoming a brilliant coder has to accept that the craft they loved is being consumed by the thing they helped create. That’s Karpathy’s real confession. Not that AI is powerful. That it hurts.
And here’s the irony: even as we unlearn, we need to be in a state of always learning. Not the quarterly tick-box kind. Not the annual compliance course your manager chases you about. Learning something every single day. Finding the right people on YouTube who can show you what’s changed this week. Reading the right newsletters. Then, using your own brain to figure out how it applies to whatever it is you’re actually doing. The learning isn’t the hard part. The hard part is accepting that learning is no longer a phase of your career. It’s the career.
What the fear is really about
Anyone in work thinks the fear is about unemployment. It’s not. The fear is about identity.
And here’s the thing that we rarely talk about. We were never rewarded for intelligence in the first place. We were rewarded for process.
You’ve been in the meeting. You know the one. You’re four slides in, and you slowly realise the numbers are out of date, or someone has already called out your strategy. Something changed over the weekend. You can feel it in the room. But you keep going, because the process says you present the deck, and the deck is the deck, and stopping to say “actually, none of this is right” would break the ritual.
You’ve sent the reply-all you didn’t mean to send. That icky moment where you try to recall it and the recall notification arrives after everyone has already read it. You send a sheepish follow-up, not to read the previous deck or email, prompting everyone to ignore the updated note and see what you got wrong. You’ve sat through a training course on a system you’ll never use because your performance review said you needed to complete it. Compliance with being artificially intelligent.
Intelligence was tolerated. Process was required.
We’re being set free. And instead of celebrating, we’re terrified. Because freedom is disorienting when you’ve spent thirty years in a process that told you exactly what to do and when to do it.
Perhaps that’s why people don’t read anymore. Perhaps the reason you still read this newsletter is that you’re curious. And curiosity, it turns out, is the skill that matters most on the other side of this.
Squeaky bum time
Alex Ferguson, the greatest football manager of all time (and I say that as a Manchester United fan who has endured a decade of pain since he retired), had a phrase for the final minutes of a tight match. When the lead was fragile and the outcome could go either way, he called it “squeaky bum time.” That moment where everyone shifts in their seat, not because the game is lost, but because it hasn’t been won yet.
We are in squeaky bum time with AI.
The old world is clearly ending. But the new world hasn’t arrived. Not in a way anyone can describe with confidence. Will there be fewer meetings? Probably. Will the 9-to-5 survive when four hours of real thinking is more exhausting than eight hours of process? Unlikely. Will the freed-up time make us more creative, or more anxious?
Nobody has the answer.
What I do know, from three years of conversations with over 200 organisations while writing my upcoming book SuperSkills, is that the human skills we buried under three decades of process are the only reliable investment left. Curiosity. Empathy. Judgment. Courage. The stuff you can’t certify. The stuff that actually matters when the machine does everything else. And right now, AI is not arriving in a calm world. It’s arriving in a world that was already shaking. Which means the skills that navigate complexity, ambiguity, and other humans aren’t nice-to-haves anymore. They’re the whole game.
Where does that leave us? With a choice. To drift, or to design. The process era is over. The intelligence era is beginning. And most of us are standing in the gap between the two, trying to figure out which way to walk.
The drawer
I kept the cables. And the USB sticks. I didn’t know what was on them, and I didn’t have time to find out. The old cables I might need for something else. Who knows? Maybe one day, when the AI apocalypse comes and we have to go back to the old world, I’ll be glad I kept a Mini USB lead and a VGA adapter.
The certificate, though, that went. Because the skill it certified was never mine. It was borrowed. A temporary competency for a temporary era, when humans had to do the work that machines couldn’t.
The next morning, I was on a coaching call. Brilliant woman, mid-career, navigating the exact transition this essay is about. We’d been working through frameworks and strategies and skills audits. Useful stuff. Process stuff. Then she stopped and asked a question that none of that had prepared her for. A question she was asked in a job application.
“What makes me, me?”
Not what makes her employable. Not what makes her competitive. What makes her her. We both sat there on a Google Meet, scratching our heads, trying to figure out where you even start with a question like that. You can’t search for it. You can’t Google it. You can’t ask ChatGPT or Claude or Gemini or Copilot or Grok. There is no tool, no framework, no certification that answers the question behind every question about AI and work and the future: what makes you, you? Authentically.
You have to use your brain. Your actual brain. The one that’s been sitting quietly behind the process for thirty years, waiting for someone to ask it a real question.
That conversation was the most intelligent thing either of us did all week. And not one second of it was artificial.
What’s left, when the artificial falls away, is what was always underneath. The intelligence that doesn’t need a certificate. The kind that can’t be trained in a beige room with strip lighting. It’s been there the whole time. Thirty years of process just made us forget it existed.
We were the AI all along. Now it’s time to be the I again.
What makes you, you?
Stay Curious - and don’t forget to be amazing,
PS. If your organisation is grappling with how AI is reshaping work and leadership, I speak and advise on this.
Rahim Hirji Author, SuperSkills (2026) | Keynote Speaker | Advisor
Building human capability for the AI era.
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Prompt Cowboy: Prompt Generator
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