Prehistoric man wasn't the the fastest, biggest, strongest or best equiped animal in terms of claws and fangs, but we didn't perish. We learned to use fire, wood, bone and stone fragments, animal furs and skins and other found materials to create objects of survival, which further evolved into objects of art and social communication. Homo Sapiens are not the only creatures of nature to make and use tools, but we certainly are the only species that have made it into a super power. Tools are extensions of our native power and as we have learned to use the tools we invented, the tools themselves have helped us invent even more power tools to exert leverage on the wild world around us.
In their 1998 paper, The Extended Mind, authors Andy Clark and David Chalmers argue that cognition doesn’t stop at the skull; it extends into the tools, environments, and relationships that actively participate in our thinking. Most of us don't bother memorizing all the phone numbers of friends and associates. Children today have never had their hands on an actual paper map (much less a parchment one) and no one does long division by hand or by abacus or even an HP 41CV (my calculator of choice in engineering school). These functions and many more now reside in silico on a permanent appendage called the Smart Phone. It was not that long ago when we all had rotary phones and hated "dialing" friends with zeros and nines in their phone number (the humour of that probably ends with baby boomers). At some point soon we'll have Neuralink-like implants in our brains, hooked up to the latest in generative AI. At some point it will be difficult to discern where the cybernetic boundary between human and artificial intelligence lives. Clearly the next species of human being is evolving in front of our digitally enhanced eyes.
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In September 2025, Salesforce cut 4,000 customer support jobs and handed much of the work to its Agentforce AI. This of course raised the ire of socialists everywhere and the headlines screamed about layoffs and social justice; but the quieter truth is even more telling: over 100 million sales leads had gone untouched for 26 years. Open conversational loops left unclosed. Stalled conversations. Human fatigue. Now, AI agents are closing those loops at scale, cutting costs by 17% and clearing the backlog in months instead of decades. Is this a sign of a coming apocalypse or the Golden Age of humanity? We have been here many times before, even if this time seems different and more awesome (in both senses of the word).
During the opening movements of the Industrial Revolution in Britain in the 19th century, groups of English textile workers known as The Luddites destroyed machinery and attacked mills in Nottinghamshire, Yorkshire, and Lancashire as acts of resistance and sabotage. Their protests were met with brutal suppression: the British government made machine-breaking a capital offence in 1812 and sent thousands of troops to crush the uprisings. Many people were executed, transported away, or imprisoned. The grievance was the same as it always has been: agency and equity in the face of technology that could strip away human dignity and living wages. AI is only the most recent threat and opportunity. Technology has been threatening to put accountants out of business for years but it's still super hard for accounting firms to find good bookeepers.
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For as long as civilization has been around, the power pendulum has swung back and forth between the elites and the masses. Sometimes labour holds the power, sometimes capital does. When the masses have what the elites need—bodies and labour—the balance tilts toward the many. When the few hold the capital and can automate away that need, the balance shifts toward the few. This dynamic is playing out again as it always has as the economy and society reconcile themselves through endless waves of growth. What’s happening now with AI is just the next swing of that pendulum—but with a twist. AI isn’t just shifting the balance of labour and capital; it’s redrawing the line between the kind of work that can be automated and the kind that can’t.
One of my CEOs gave the keynote address this year at a conference attended by the leaders of the alternative finance industry in Canada. In speaking about the "threat of AI", he said that he was less concerned that a strong competitor would put him out of business and more afraid that another firm would use AI to outperform or outmaneuver him despite having less innate capability or experience. In otherwords, he didn't want to bring a knife to a drone fight. He is now looking to blend the best of what talent can offer with the best of what technology can offer: using human and intellectual capital to multiply his financial capital and keep on delivering premium returns to his investors and meaningful anf fulfilling work to his staff.
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In No Rules Rules, Reed Hastings credits Netflix’s breakthrough culture to what he calls talent density—the idea that a smaller team of exceptional people often outperforms a larger team of average ones. After the 2001 layoffs, Netflix discovered that with fewer but stronger contributors, creativity soared, communication sped up, and bureaucracy fell away. High talent density made trust scalable: brilliant jerks were shown the door, freedom replaced control, and excellence became the organizing principle. This is the optimal use of human and financial capital to support business growth. The next edge isn’t about reducing headcount, it’s about talent extension: using AI agents to augment the work that humans do by doing what they are inherently poised to do better.
In his 2009 book, Drive, Dan Pink anticipated this current moment in history by distinguishing two types of human work: algorithmic tasks and heuristic tasks. Algorithmic tasks, workflows, procedures and processes are linear. We can work backwards from a goal and then codify them in a clear set of cause and effect rules (which define a kind of white-collar assemby line of tasks of the tyoe that the human agents at Salesforce we not getting to). The left hemisphere of our brains is particularly adept at this sort of analytical and goal-directed thinking. It is clear to me that if you have a job or bsuienss that is very left hemisphere intensive and requires lots of date processing and information processing, you might be fucked as AI gets better and more generative.
For Pink, heuristic processing requires judgment, creativity, and problem-solving when no single, correct algorithm exists. This is more resistant to being replaced by AI: as soon as we can express rules of thimb about a process it has become a left-hemisphere linear algorithm. In design thinking, a recursive process is non-linear, experimental and iterative. A recursive loop begins when a person poses a question in relation to an objective and obstacle. This kind of thinking is more right hemishpheric and operates more on hunches and intuitions. The process returns "answers" to the "questions" which the often begs further questions. All complex processes are fundementally recursive and unpredictable: we unpack them one iteration at time and time and it is not really possible to work backwards from "an end in mind". This is where human wisdom, art and judgement live in vivo, as it is people wh decide what is beautiful, what is just, what is functional and what is sustainable. AI can be enormously useful in running the loop but people are best suited to determining if what the loop returns is "good".
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Organic human talent–in all of its emotional glory–still has an important role to play in the on-going drama of the unfolding of the human race. In my experience, highly talented people are not generally threatened by the prospects of being put out of business by an AI; they are more interested in learning about how digital agents might extend their talent into new areas of human flourishing. Do we need to be mindful of losing our humanity as we form relationships with non-human partners? Of course we do. But we are all on the razor's edge of really determining what is undeniably and irreplaceably human.
Talent drag is a common complaint of the entrepreneurs and CEOs I coach. They see AI as a way to amplify the best of what their people have to offer while freeing them from the drudgery of what they weren't really getting to anyway. Our habitually more socialist nation is lagging behind the rest of a more capitalist world using technology to outperform and outmaneuver us. As a country, let's be like the small and ferocious AI-augmented team that's out in the world crushing it.
I'd like to see the larger and clunkier nations and their companies shiver and scream...
"oh fuck, here come the Canadians."