It Was Never About AI

To read more from Eric Markowitz, visit his website www.outlastbook.com. Where you can read his latest essays and subscribe to his newsletter.

Let me tell you how this works.

A twenty-six-year-old quantitative analyst at a hedge fund in midtown Manhattan—a person who has never managed an employee, never sat across from a customer, never had to explain to someone that their position has been eliminated—opens a spreadsheet, sees that your company's headcount is 14% higher than a competitor's, and writes a note to institutional investors that your stock is overweight.

That note gets circulated and your stock drops. Your board panics. They call the CEO, who was hired eighteen months ago specifically to "unlock shareholder value," a phrase that should be studied by future anthropologists as one of the great euphemisms of our time. An all-hands meeting is called. Two weeks later, 3,000 people get a calendar invite from HR titled "Quick Chat."

This is the system working exactly as designed.

Meanwhile, in Silicon Valley, a founder stands on a stage in a fleece vest and speaks with the cadence of a preacher about "building the future" and "empowering humanity" while unveiling a product whose entire purpose is to make human labor unnecessary. The audience applauds and the VCs nod approvingly.

Nobody in the room seems to notice the contradiction, or if they do, they've gotten very good at not caring.

These two worlds—Wall Street and Silicon Valley—have formed a feedback loop of short-termism so tight, so self-reinforcing, that they've confused efficiency with purpose, growth with meaning, and the elimination of people with progress.

They have built a religion out of optimization. And they are coming for your job with the enthusiasm of true believers.

***

I took a walk this week with one of my closest friends, a successful entrepreneur who now operates and invests in many businesses.

We discussed the now-viral essay about how AI is coming for pretty much everyone—that its capabilities are so profound there won't be meaningful work left for anyone. Walking tends to be the best reset I can possibly do, especially in nature, and we were surrounded by evergreens and redwoods on a particularly charming, sunny Portland day.

It was a good place to talk about the end of work as we know it. The trees, at least, seemed unimpressed. They've survived dozens of icy winters, and I suspect they'll outlast what comes next.

Over the last few hundred years, we began to see ourselves as separate from the natural world—masters of it, rather than participants in it.

We built systems that prize speed above all else, and in doing so we lost the most fundamental lesson that nature teaches: speed of growth makes you fragile. The tree that shoots up fastest is the first to fall in a storm. The invasive species that spreads the quickest chokes out everything around it and then collapses when conditions change.

The ecosystems that endure—the ones that survive fire and drought and ice—are the ones that grew slowly, developed deep root systems, and built interdependence with the living things around them.

There is not a single venture capitalist on Earth who would fund a redwood or a sequoia. Too slow. Not scalable. We have severed ourselves from the wisdom of nature, and we built a financialized economy in its absence. It's an economy that optimizes for the quarter, not the century. An economy that treats speed as virtue and patience as weakness. An economy that looks at a forest and sees lumber, not a blueprint for resilience.

And now, with AI accelerating everything to a velocity we can barely comprehend, we are about to learn what nature has always known: that which grows without roots does not survive.

***

Here is what the gospel of efficiency tells us: if a process can be made faster, it must be made faster.

If a human can be replaced, the human must be replaced.

There is an almost zealous religiosity to this idea, and one that few of us would ever question. The immediate beneficiaries of AI will no doubt capture the headlines—companies laying off workers, streamlining operations, extracting capital at breathtaking speed. Rational actors, all of them. Except these are all fictions.

They are stories we tell ourselves about the purpose of a company, stories written by people whose time horizon ends at the next earnings call and whose moral imagination, if it exists, resides somewhere in the P&L statement.

Today, more than ever, it is worth remembering: the most successful companies of the last generation are the ones whose leaders very specifically, almost gleefully, denied short-term profits. They told Wall Street to be patient or go away. Jeff Bezos wrote a letter to shareholders in 1997 that essentially said: we will not optimize for you. Warren Buffett has spent sixty years making the same point with varying degrees of folksy contempt.

Wall Street, of course, has hated it for long stretches of time. And then made fortunes off of it. The irony is rich. The lesson could not be more clear, and yet it remains almost universally ignored: the companies that win are the ones that refuse to play the short game. But the short game is all Wall Street knows how to score.

Now think about what actually happens when you gut a company of its people.

Fewer human inputs mean fewer real-world experiences shaping decisions. Capital gets extracted and the spreadsheet looks gorgeous. The quarterly report is a masterpiece. But who stewards the organization when crisis hits? What values does it hold? What institutional memory exists when the only employees left are a skeleton crew managing prompts? A company without humans who carry hard-won judgment and lived experience is not a company.

It is a shell with a ticker symbol, a slow-motion collapse dressed up as innovation.

Of course, this assumes the people running organizations have any outlook beyond next Tuesday, which—as I increasingly believe—many don't. The average CEO tenure is now under five years. They're not building cathedrals—they're South Florida house flippers in 2006.

But here's where I land, and where I landed on that walk through the redwoods with my friend, sunlight cutting through branches that have been growing for centuries.

This is not about AI. I need to say that clearly, and I need you to hear it. This was never about AI.

Every generation has faced a version of this moment.

The printing press was going to destroy the church. The locomotive was going to destroy the human body. Electricity was going to destroy sleep. The assembly line was going to destroy craftsmanship. The internet was going to destroy truth. And every single time, the same question sat at the center of the panic, even if nobody quite said it out loud: are we our tools, or are we something more?

This is about our relationship with tools. It always has been. Tools are extraordinary. They extend what we can do, what we can reach, what we can build. But somewhere along the way, we started to confuse what a tool can do with what a tool should do.

We began to believe that because a capability exists, it must be deployed. That because a machine can replace a person, the person must go. This is abdication of our moral duty as humans. It is surrendering our judgment to our instruments and calling it progress.

The reason this moment feels so acute, so existential, is not because AI is uniquely powerful—although it is. It's because AI has arrived at precisely the moment when we have already hollowed out so much of what makes work meaningful.

We have already financialized everything. We have already reduced human beings to line items and disposed of them like inventory. We have already built an economy that treats people as costs to be minimized rather than as the very source of the value being created.

AI didn't cause this. AI is just holding up a mirror, and we don't like what we see.

So the real conversation—the one that matters, the one I think most of us are hungry to have—is not about artificial intelligence at all. It is about the purpose of money: is it a tool for building things that matter, or just a way of keeping score in a game that's making us all miserable? It is about what a company owes to the people who build it, to the communities it operates in, to the future it claims to be creating.

It is about what growth even means when the planet is on fire and loneliness is an epidemic and the average worker hasn't had a real raise in forty years. These are not technical questions. They are moral ones. And no algorithm is going to answer them for us.

Here is what I believe.

I believe there are a vast majority of us deeply want to find meaning in our work. Who understand, in a way that no spreadsheet can capture, that the best things humans have ever built were built slowly, with care, by people who gave a damn.

I believe that choosing not to use a tool—or choosing how to use it, with intention and with conscience—is not weakness. It is the most radical act of leadership available to us right now.

I believe that the companies that survive the next era won't be the ones that moved fastest. They will be the ones that moved with purpose. The ones that kept their people. The ones that chose meaning over margin, long-term resilience over short-term extraction, humanity over efficiency.

And I believe this because I've seen it. I've seen it in the owner who refuses to lay off her team even though the math says she should. I've seen it in the small manufacturer who keeps his factory in the town where he grew up because the town needs the jobs more than he needs the savings. I've seen it in the founder who looks at AI and says: this is a tool, and I will decide how it serves us—not the other way around. These people exist.

I am one of them, in my own tiny way. I have two research assistants. Could I replace them with AI? Of course. But their value extends their weekly output. They give meaning to my work and I love seeing the excitement in their faces when they make a new discovery that I, alone, could not have found. They make our team stronger in a way I cannot express on my balance sheet, but I know, in my gut, that they make everything we're doing together better.

Let me say it again: we are not our tools. We never have been.

And the moment we remember that—truly remember it—is the moment we start building something worth a damn.