Rahim Hirji on The Entropy Podcast: what is still worth paying for once intelligence is cheap

Francis GormanWhat does it mean to be valuable in a world where intelligence has become abundant?

If you take a step back, intelligence now, it feels like a commodity. It's at our fingertips. I try and get people to think back to many years ago when you used to have these scribes that used to write on animal skin with quills. They used to be able to write three words a minute. It would take them almost a year to write a book, and then they'd have to think about how that would be distributed. That was basically intelligence that they were trying to farm out to others. That has obviously got faster over the years. I'm now talking into a voice app and instead of doing three words a minute, I'm doing a hundred and eighty words a minute, because that's what the app tells me.

A lot of the speed has happened, but really it's not about what we're doing. All of this stuff is being crunched up using all of the LLMs. They're taking all of the data, all of the knowledge, all of the intelligence that they have been trained on, they're putting that into their systems, and we are using them. So the premium has changed. It's no longer about the actual intelligence. There may be layers around it, but really I think about the decision making, the judgement.

I was talking to a group the other day and they said, what's really valuable now? And I said, what's really valuable now is taste, because everything kind of seems the same these days, and what's different is your own personal opinion on certain things. Whether you like something, whether you don't like something, whether you think something's good, whether you think something's bad. Judgement, taste, accountability. Those are the things when intelligence is abundant. We've got to look at other places.

Francis GormanI do think there is this blandness or this sameness creeping into the internet, and you can feel it. It's almost abrasive.

Exactly. Spider-Man has these spidey senses. You kind of know when you've got a reply back from someone, an email, whether they've used AI or not, immediately, because you get the first sentence. Sometimes it's okay, because it's a pretty basic email and you just want to get something across. But sometimes people are trying to have a conversation with you and they're going back and forth and it just feels disingenuous, because it feels as if you're talking to a machine rather than a real human being, and sometimes you're not sure whether it's truthful or if it's real. That's the world that we're in right now.

Francis GormanThere's an idea growing that AI makes human skills more important. Is that actually true?

I think it's half true. You can use AI every day, every minute of every day, but if you don't lean in to your human skills, they're just going to erode. They're not going to get any better. You've got to lean in and you've got to be more human for them to take off.

In a very simple example, teamwork. If you don't continue to work in a team, you don't know what it means about the nuance of agreement and disagreement and where you need to change and getting to an end goal. Whereas if you're working in a team all the time, you're learning that nuance and you get that bond with other people. My personal view is that AI has become this leveller where everyone is stepping up to a certain level, and then you get these human skills, but you've really got to invest in them.

There's a concept that I mention to leadership teams and corporates which is called synthetic seniority, and people love it because it puts a name on something that they have been feeling within the organisation. It's where you get people who look senior because they've been using AI to come up with new ideas that put them at the table with someone who's very senior. Someone who's maybe got one or two years experience, they're very good at using AI, and if I was in their shoes I would probably be doing the same thing.

But what happens is they've been using this tech, and then when they get to that level, they're able to have a conversation, but they don't know the natural flow of what's happening. So when things go wrong, there's this vacant area where they're not able to qualify how they've got to that point. It's worrying because they haven't got the wisdom in there. We're in this new era where you've got to have people who are working together, those who are AI proficient with those who are not so AI proficient, together, bringing that wisdom from the old world and new world. That is going to be really powerful. But if you separate those two and put them in competition it becomes like a fork.

Francis GormanI've been using the term brittle intelligence. It's falling apart a little bit. People come into a room, they form what good looks like, and when you take the viewpoint that you fell on your face on five years previous and put it in the room, they go silent, because it's a hypothesis they're not familiar with.

Someone with not very much experience is able to emulate the fact that they've got ten years experience and able to sit at the table with someone else who's got the same level. And that creates this problem, not because they're able to have that conversation. The problem is when things go wrong and they don't have the scar tissue of what went wrong last time.

Francis GormanWhat are the most important skills into the future, and do we need to make changes to the education system?

The structure of the education system is very difficult. I'd love to go and redesign it from scratch. There are some great education systems out there. Minerva is a university you may have heard of. There's one set up in London called the London Interdisciplinary School. They teach things in a completely different way and they've been able to redesign what the education system is, teaching things like how to be more curious in your day to day.

I have created these levels of skills which start with survival skills. How do you survive in the workplace these days? Literally survival in the old days was how do you stay alive. Now it's about how you maintain your job, how you do well in that area. The second level I call street skills. How do you get your project on the agenda, how do you get your voice to be heard. Learning the language of work. Then there are things that we have known for many years, and it's really been the bet of education, where we have invested all of our time and money going through the education system, sometimes spending a lot of money going into higher education, with a bet that you'll have this job or this vocation. That's my third level and I call it specialist skills. Then soft skills, which we have been talking about for the last twenty years. Critical thinking is absolutely important for anyone in this day and age. And then I've got my layer of super skills.

It's interesting that we've taken a bet on the middle layer, specialist skills, to be able to do a job, and now what's at risk is that middle layer, because you put all of this money in there but actually the jobs are changing. So the bet that you made to do the job that you wanted to do for the rest of your life, that job might not be there, because it's being pulled apart. Tasks are being changed.

The interesting thing is those bottom two layers, we've never had a certificate for. You never have a certificate for having survival skills, and understanding the nuance of work, understanding when your boss says that's fine or that's fine. Similarly, you need these new ways of working with the machine. At some point you're going to have an AI employee with you in the workplace. At some point you might have an AI overlord or a boss who you're going to have to work with. These are things that are alien to us right now.

Francis GormanIs there a skill we think is super important today that will not sustain over the next decade?

Let me take that a slightly different way. We have for many years operated in the workplace doing certain things. Writing reports. Minutes for meetings. Providing actions on those meetings. Some of these things are repetitive. The way I would look at it now, and this will be different in many fields, is: what is repetitive that you can take away, and what is the machine better at? Instead of looking at the specific skills, you look at the workplace and you say, what is the busy work that you don't need anymore?

I've been on podcasts talking about this. You used to spend hours on PowerPoints, looking at them and moving them, making sure that they're all aligned. No one cares about that anymore, because you just press a button and it's done, the whole deck is created for you with your knowledge base on the deck. Equally, sometimes you just don't need the report anymore. So the question is, what is going to be most valuable in the workplace, and then you work back from that. The busy work is going away, and the stuff that you need your brain trained for becomes more important.

What about kids, and what should parents teach that schools don't? My thing was, how to be bored. How do you sit with a problem without going to AI? People find that difficult now. You've become defaulted to using the tech. It might have been the Google doc that you were using before, and now you might be going to Claude or ChatGPT or Gemini or Copilot. I would take a step back and say, you've got all of these devices, how do you sit in a room, two or three individuals, having a discussion, no tech, and see what happens. And that's not just for the kids. That's for adults in the workplace when you're trying to solve problems. Step away, and really figure out exactly what it is that you want, and then you can go to the tech.

Francis GormanDoes curiosity need to be taught and practised, or are we losing it?

The obvious answer is you need to teach yourself to ask the questions all the time. But you really need to practise it. It's very easy to outsource and get the cheat code. At our age it becomes even more important to draw that hard line and say, I personally am going to look into this myself.

People say, you said to me that curiosity is a super skill, and I'd say to everyone that I'm curious, but I think I've become really lazy, how do I do that? I'd say, just take away the things that have become default from your life, at least for a time, so you know what you've lost. If you've lost the ability to brainstorm, or even draw a mind map, see if you can come up with the five or six things. What I try and do is, instead of using Claude, I'll try and create the mind map and say, here are five or six different areas, and see if I can beat Claude or ChatGPT on the different areas that I'm trying to think through, and see what I'm missing.

Francis GormanWhat are the decisions in our life that we've already given to AI without realising?

The Google calendar one is the obvious one. A product manager deciding that a meeting should be thirty minutes or an hour, and that's the easiest thing that you should do. But we see it every day. Spotify and Netflix. Your Netflix will be different to my Netflix.

I use Google Maps all the time, but there is a direction, you're going to a certain destination. Sometimes I'm driving on the motorway and things change and you're thinking, why am I following this route? Are we a hundred per cent sure that it is the right route? And who is it right for? Is it right for me to get there quicker? Is it right for me to get there with the least spend on petrol? Is it right for the people who manage traffic? Who is it right for?

I've fallen into the trap where I've taken a route because Google Maps has told me to, and I knew at the back of my head that that route was closed. I knew that the road was closed, but I still went down that route because I just said, okay, Google says to go that way. If you ask the question of what are you doing on a day to day basis, you realise that there are a lot of decisions that have been made for you by algorithms. And those algorithms have been trained by humans at the outset.

Francis GormanHow do you know when you become overdependent on the technology?

If you don't know when the answer is wrong. If you're using an LLM and you become overly dependent on it, and you don't know when certain bits of it are wrong, or if you haven't questioned it, or if you're accepting the first draft without even thinking about it, then that becomes a very dangerous situation.

There's the example of Air France 447, flying between Rio and Paris. There's a concept called the children of the magenta line. It's in my book, in my augmented mindset skill, where the pilots could fly on automation, but when something went wrong with the engine they started to struggle. They didn't know what was wrong and they also didn't know what they needed to do, because they had become so dependent on the machine, and they thought the machine was doing this all the time. A lot of people died in that situation.

The way I would say we should think about it: if you don't know whether you're right or wrong in a certain situation, go back to what you were doing. You'll know the term in project management and tech, the old school term of parallel pathing. It's a very old school methodology of doing two things at the same time. I would say do two things at the same time so you don't become overly dependent on the stuff that is automated, because what it does is it gets you to think, here's the friction of stuff that I know, here's a situation of things that are right, here's a situation of things that are wrong.

It might be that you are doing some research using Claude. Does it look right? Let me go and do some research using old school Google and see what comes up. Let me build that out myself whilst doing Claude. It's so important to get it right at the beginning that I have this phrase I call human at the start. Really thinking about the problem yourself first before you start using certain areas. To step away from overdependence, or drift, algorithmic drift, parallel path what it is that you're doing, and use your human intuition right at the beginning.

Francis GormanI was watching my fourteen-month-old exploring, always getting into the next adventure. As we get older that curiosity evaporates. At our age, how do you keep it?

If your son's playing around and figuring out things, he's learning curiosity. He's learning that trait. You're leaving him to figure things out by himself at that age. I think at our age it becomes even more important to draw that hard line. We have these great tools. We're living in this age where we have got so much that we can do. We could do so much good with the technology that we've got available to us now. But at the same time, you need to realise when it is good to use the tech and when it is good to not use the tech. I'm a proponent of human plus AI. It can be very, very powerful. But also there's a time and a place for certain things.

Francis GormanYou're an advocate for AI. Is there anything that worries you?

What worries me is that we skew too quickly towards AI. Time and time again I am seeing organisations that are cutting stuff quickly. My thesis is you need to look at the human first and see what you can do when you augment them, and then see what you need to do after them. A lot of companies will just be saying, okay, cost base needs to be reduced, and that's what they're looking at.

I was speaking with one organisation and I put this scenario to them. I said, what happens if you were able to cut your global workforce by ninety per cent? And they looked at me and said, oh, that's not possible. I said, let's take the scenario that you're able to take the whole organisation, automate it, create all these agentic workflows, do all of this stuff, reduce the number of individuals by ninety per cent. Would you take that option? And they looked at me for a time. I thought they were thinking that's an exciting proposition. I think that got them to think that it's unviable to be thinking in that way. They thought about it becoming a vacuous organisation which doesn't have a heart or a soul.

The thing that worries me is that companies will cut too fast, too quickly, and then try and go back to the old world, and they realise that they've lost the wisdom. They've lost all that expertise that they had. They've lost the talent of people that they've had for many years that they've been building. They've lost people at certain levels of the rung within their organisation. And then net net they'll be in a worse world. So I really encourage organisations to think differently and not just think about cost base. Look at revenue upside, look at augmenting the teams that you have with the right types of skills, human skills plus AI, and the right type of AI. You don't necessarily need to use an LLM all the time.

Francis GormanFor someone listening today who wants to do a self assessment, have you got any advice?

There's a free tool available on my site. It's a questionnaire. For twenty minutes you answer all of these questions and it gives you a view on how dependent you are on AI, how you need to think about AI, these different personas. It's worth having a play around with it, spending the twenty minutes really understanding where you sit, and coming back to it maybe in a month's time and two months' time to really understand how you're using AI. Are you becoming dependent on AI? Should you be becoming more dependent in certain areas? Are you using it for speed or are you using it for decision making? It's not very techy. It's for anyone of any ilk, any age. It'll make you feel that you've got a path that you can go down over the coming months and years.

Francis GormanI'm really looking forward to reading the book and getting into it myself. Huge insights there. Best of luck with the book.