A.I. is Better than You

You used to only have to compete with other humans.

Oh, the good old days!

Now, you need to compete with A.I.

And it’s not a fair fight. A.I. can do many things that you could never hope to do. It can solve math problems that have stumped our best human mathematicians for decades.

While A.I. struggles with a few things that humans can do well, it’s not going to take long for A.I. to get better in these areas.

A few years back, people predicted the world would need “Prompt Engineers”, humans who were really good at prompting A.I. to do what you wanted. This would be an entirely new career for people who got good at “talking” to A.I.

Do we still need prompt engineers? Maybe for a bit…

I predicted that Prompt Engineering would be a short-lived career almost as soon as I learned about it.

A.I. is getting better exponentially. A.I. agents can now do even more work that humans consider useful with even less human prompting. While I still think that humans have more agency than A.I. agents, even this is changing.

What matters now?

Humans need to embrace change! A.I. can do most things better than you. Your self-worth cannot be tied to your ability to do things that A.I. is not able to do. We need to adapt to a world where humans learn to work with A.I. systems.

And we need to celebrate what makes us uniquely human!

While I usually don’t enjoy dealing with human customer service agents, I’ve recently had a couple of HORRIBLE experiences with A.I. customer service agents.

Will A.I. get better at customer service? Sure. It just sucks for human customers in the meantime.

Because A.I. keeps improving, we need to learn to work more effectively with A.I. systems.

“You should already be using AI proactively as a second opinion on taxes, legal issues, and medical issues.” — Ethan Mollick, in an interview with Derek Thompson (10/20/2026)

As of today, human chefs are better than A.I. powered robots. Humans give better massages. Humans are better at providing customer service. I want human pilots, human engineers, human artists, and human teachers to be there for me.

More than anything, I want human friends to remain relevant.