I’m 53 years old, with 30 years of experience behind me, and I am earnestly exploring what I want to be when I grow up. That may sound playful, but it’s my reality.
Like many experienced professionals, I once assumed the shape of my working life was settled. I would keep progressing, draw on the expertise and relationships I had built, and eventually move toward retirement. Then two ideas collided. The first was that artificial intelligence was advancing faster than most of us understood or cared to acknowledge. The second was that advances in healthspan, the years we spend healthy and capable, could give us far more productive years than earlier generations ever expected. Together they meant I couldn’t assume the future would arrive after I left the workforce. It might arrive while I still had decades of contribution ahead of me.
That realization energized me more than it frightened me (though I admit it did both). I want to keep learning, contributing, and growing, and I want my experience to matter. It turns out I’m not the only one wrestling with this. Many experienced professionals are quietly asking the same question: Will someone like me still matter when AI becomes more capable than I am?
I do think we have some real things to worry about, but I also think we’re asking an incomplete question. I believe the arrival of artificial general intelligence (AGI) has the opportunity to actually raise the value of the human contributions that matter most. This manifesto is my case for that belief, and for what it asks (demands) of us.
What’s Really Changing
No one knows exactly when artificial general intelligence will arrive. By AGI, I mean AI that can match or exceed human ability across most intellectual tasks and adapt to new situations without being reprogrammed for each one. There’s no agreed definition and no agreed test, but waiting for certainty is not a strategy. AI can already research, write, analyze, code, persuade, and support complex decisions, and it will keep becoming more capable and more embedded in how organizations work.
The risks are real, and they are serious. Advanced AI could, and likely will, disrupt employment as we know it today, concentrate power, widen inequality, weaken privacy, and create consequences its developers can’t predict — which is why governance, safety, and accountability matter enormously. Fear can’t be our only organizing principle, though. Alongside the questions about which company is ahead and how many jobs may disappear, we need to ask which human qualities might become more valuable because AI exists, and what becomes scarce when intelligence becomes abundant.
For most of history, intelligence was scarce. Expertise took years to build, good analysis was expensive, and access to both was uneven: a large company could hire teams of specialists, and a small business couldn’t. AI is becoming a great IQ equalizer. Many forms of high-level intellectual work are now within reach of anyone who knows how to ask, and the quality of the result depends on the person asking and the judgment applied afterward.
When good answers become cheap, the ability to ask the right questions becomes more valuable. When analysis is everywhere, deciding which analysis matters becomes more valuable. When options multiply, judgment matters more, and when almost anything can be optimized, human values matter more. Those most at risk may be those who built their identity entirely around being the person who knows the most, being deemed “the smartest one in the room.” The future will reward people who can invoke their innate curiosity, lean into empathy, and decipher which problems deserve attention, which tradeoffs are acceptable, when the AI output is wrong, and when it may be right but shouldn’t be followed.
This is what I mean by Human Value Moves Upstream™: as AI takes on more of the work of producing answers, human value shifts (it must) toward directing intelligence.
The Executive Imperative™
Trying to outperform machines at speed or sheer volume of work is a losing game. Our task is now to become better stewards of what intelligence makes possible, and that starts with six capabilities, which I call The Executive Imperative™. They belong to anyone willing to lead from where they are, whatever their title. These capabilities are often dismissed as “soft skills,” yet they are what determines whether intelligence is applied wisely and fairly, and whether change earns trust.
Judgment. AI can generate great options, but an option has to become a decision. For much of the modern business era, leaders asked what they could do; the more important question now is what they should do. A company may be able to remove human review from an important decision or monitor every action an employee takes; judgment decides whether it should, and experience, when it stays flexible, is one of its best sources.
Curiosity. AI is exceptionally good at answering well-written prompts, which makes the questions we ask that much more important. The most valuable professional may be the one who notices what others overlook, questions the original framing, or asks whether we’re solving the right problem in the first place. Curiosity is also the antidote to feeling behind. Begin where you are, try the tools, and make all the mistakes; embarrassment is wasted energy. Now is the time to play again, so enjoy it!
Communication. AI can produce polished language in seconds, but communication is the creation of shared understanding. Leaders still have to explain why change is necessary, state what is known and what remains uncertain, and help people see themselves in a future they didn’t necessarily choose. In an age of synthetic communication, authentic, open, and honest communication will carry a premium.
Empathy. Disruption is experienced one person at a time. Our jobs can be a source of our identity, dignity, and pride, and when leaders talk casually about eliminating roles, someone may hear that the skills they spent a lifetime building no longer matter, and wonder if they ever did. Empathy leaves space for hard decisions but requires understanding the human consequences and acting with care, which is what makes sustained accountability possible. Empathy will play a critical role in protecting company cultures going forward.
Critical/Systems Thinking. AI makes local optimization easier. A company can cut costs in one department while creating risk in another, or remove entry-level work so efficiently that future professionals never gain the experience senior roles require. Critical systems thinkers look at the full picture to consider what happens next, who bears the cost, and what people may stop learning, so that a local improvement isn’t mistaken for real progress.
Courage. As AI makes persuasion cheap, trust becomes one of the defining currencies of the era, and protecting it often means choosing the harder path. Courage means telling the truth when distortion would be easier, owning AI-assisted decisions, refusing to hand moral accountability to an algorithm, and sometimes saying that a promising project just isn’t ready.
The more capable the technology becomes, the more capable its human stewards must become. That is our Human Imperative.
A Longer Healthspan Changes the Question
The second idea matters as much as the first. (Western) medicine has historically been better at extending life than at extending health: a 2024 study of 183 countries found the gap between the two (lifespan and healthspan) had widened to 9.6 years globally, and to 12.4 years in the United States (JAMA Network Open). Longevity medicine and AI are now collaborating to close that gap. No drug or protocol has yet been shown to dramatically extend life in healthy people, but there is a strong basis for expecting longer working lives. The Stanford Center on Longevity expects that people who live to 100 may work for 60 years or more, with on-ramps and off-ramps along the way (Stanford Center on Longevity).
That is where longevity and AI collide. AI may reduce the value of some of our current tasks at exactly the moment longer, healthier lives make continued work possible, or even necessary. The answer is to become better at transition, and the better question is how to keep making a contribution that matters. Experienced professionals bring assets that are easy to underestimate, from pattern recognition to credibility to knowing when an elegant solution will fail in the real world, and those strengths grow more valuable when paired with AI and continued learning.
At 53, I no longer think of myself as entering the last quarter of my working life. I may be closer to the middle of it. Reinvention builds on what came before, and two revolutions arriving together may give us something earlier generations rarely had: permission to reinvent ourselves more than once.
The World We Should Be Building
The deeper promise of AI is that people might spend less time on work that drains them and more time on what gives life meaning, and that advanced intelligence could spread opportunity instead of concentrating it. That future is possible, but it isn’t guaranteed. Technology doesn’t choose its social purpose; people do. That’s why I see The Executive Imperative™ as a civic and leadership responsibility as well as a career strategy.
I’m optimistic, and my optimism is earned through agency. Earned hope looks directly at risk and refuses helplessness. It learns, experiments, tells the truth, and builds the capabilities a difficult future demands. Leaders have long been advised to surround themselves with people smarter than they are, and AGI may become the most powerful version of that advice we’ve encountered. Working alongside a more capable intelligence can stretch us, but only if we stay active participants and refuse to let convenience replace agency or intelligence replace wisdom.
AI will keep improving. The question is whether we will. The real AGI race is a human one, and it has already begun.
