New essay — Lean Back to Leap Forward: the catapult logic of AI strategy →

The creed

A manifesto for the social edge

Let us be plain about the pitch. This is not a critique of AI, and it is certainly not nostalgia for the pre-digital office.

AI's intelligence was never its own. It was forged in conversation, argument, institutional friction, and collaborative struggle — and it will starve without them.

So here is the central proposition, without frills: AI's future depends on the richness of human life.

Eleven commitments

  1. 01

    Treat human interaction as infrastructure. Viscosity is fuel, not overhead. We budget for it, maintain it, and account for its depletion the way engineers account for fatigue in steel.

  2. 02

    Automate the projectile; never the arm. We map every activity as kill zone or relational fortress before deploying automation, and we defend the fortress even when the spreadsheet argues otherwise.

  3. 03

    Keep the on-ramps open. Entry-level work is how judgement is transmitted between generations. When AI absorbs the tasks, we redesign the roles rather than delete the rung.

  4. 04

    Reinvest the surplus in people. A defined share of every AI saving funds new high-interaction roles. Savings that vanish into the margin are mining, whatever the press release says.

  5. 05

    Design friction on purpose. Consensus that forms without resistance is a warning sign. We build structured mechanisms for candid challenge and protect the people who use them.

  6. 06

    Verify before we amplify. We refuse to be part of the 91.3 per cent. Machine output is interrogated — sources, logic, and dissent invited — before it travels under our name.

  7. 07

    Measure learning, not just output. Faster drafts are not progress if the organisation understands nothing new. Workslop is consumption dressed as productivity, and we call it by its name.

  8. 08

    Refuse surveillance Taylorism. Monitoring that optimises observable output while destroying trust, autonomy, and tacit knowledge is self-harm at organisational scale. We will not build it, buy it, or submit to it quietly.

  9. 09

    Cultivate the tails. Dissent, rare expertise, and awkward formulations are where breakthroughs live — in institutions and in training data alike. We protect the edge cases from the averaging machine.

  10. 10

    Recruit the cross-thinkers. The richest reserves of tacit knowledge sit outside the credentialed world, much of it in the majority world. We build platforms that observe, translate, credential, and invest — and we measure ourselves by who gets elevated.

  11. 11

    Lead convex. We convert cognitive abundance into structural ambition, and we judge leaders by the asymmetry of their payoffs, not the polish of their busywork.

The pledge

I have read the eleven commitments. Within my authority — as a leader, a builder, a teacher, or a colleague — I will practise them, and I will not pretend that mining is strategy.