The One Percent Rule

A rising chorus of tech visionaries now forecasts widespread unemployment, a white collared bloodbath, at the hands of artificial intelligence, prompting a critical question: Is this wave of automation fundamentally different, or are we underestimating the core human attributes indispensable to the future workplace?

While some tasks, and whole jobs, will undoubtedly be ceded to AI, a more insidious risk than job displacement alone is the potential erosion of distinct human capabilities through over-reliance on algorithmic solutions, a modern echo of the 15th-century fear that printing presses might flood the world with words while starving it of wisdom.

Half a millennium after Erasmus of Rotterdam voiced that warning to his fellow scholars, we are again awash in automation, information, and algorithmic fluency. But the question has shifted. It is no longer what machines will do to books. It is what AI systems will do to us, and crucially, what uniquely human capacities we must cultivate to thrive alongside them.