To judge or not to judge? That's out of the question

Mon, 02 Nov 2026 00:00:00 +0000

At this very moment, someone is probably tearing AI to pieces, for one reason or another: unemployment, a new class of oligopolies, or some reckless approach to safety. Personally, I worry most about losing my own skills without acquiring newer, more valuable ones. As the saying goes, the shirt closest to your body is the dearest - and I suspect the reader shares the same fear.

It’s fascinating to try to predict the one-sentence difference between us and the generations that will grow up in the AI era. What form will their adaptation take? It’s easy to agree that when you delegate a task for long enough, you lose the skill behind it. We forget how to do mental arithmetic once we switch to a calculator, and lose our feel for a paper map once we switch to Google Maps. Never before has a person had this much freedom to delegate such a wide range of tasks - at least in everything digital. Everyone is a manager now. The popular forecast - “we’ll get dumber, look, kids already score worse on exams” - unsettles me, but it seems more likely that we’ll lose something here and gain something there (on average, across the population). Adapting the brain means reusing its resources, so the real question is: who’s first in line to be dropped?

Writing on Sergey Potekhin

To judge or not to judge? That's out of the question