John Henry has been in the SF zeitgeist lately. He won the race against the steam drill, and then it didn’t matter. The drill replaced him and everyone like him. Physical strength used to define worth. Machines changed that. Strength didn’t disappear---it just stopped being economically meaningful. Now it’s something cultivated for health, for aesthetics, for personal satisfaction.

Intelligence is in the middle of the same transition. Working tirelessly on complex mental tasks requiring knowledge and experience---that’s what I was valued for, by myself and by every company I’ve worked at. Agents can do it now, cheaper and faster. What remains? Sure, virtues still remain. Temperance, loyalty, forgiveness, etc. But what might mark excellence in our new future?

Imagination? Even when AI can answer any question perfectly, can tutor you in any skill, or generate breakthrough scientific data, we must still bridge the natural world to our understanding. Einstein generated no new experimental data, yet his Gedankenexperimente—imagining himself riding a beam of light, watching a clock tower recede—gave us the metaphors and theories to help us understand our physical reality.

Conviction! Conviction stands in opposition to AI. AI is a non-deterministic trend towards the mean; conviction is the inner mettle to stand apart. The truths we hold in opposition to accepted wisdom or the cruelties of circumstance. Look to Deng Xiaoping: purged twice during the Cultural Revolution, his son paralyzed by Red Guards. He returned each time with the same beliefs, led China’s reform era, then retired in 1989. Three years later, at 87, with no title and no obligation, he got on a train and embarked on the Southern Tour---pushing China towards markets when the entire party apparatus, terrified by the Soviet collapse, wanted to retreat.

Taste. It is conviction made legible. After lying dormant in one person’s heart, taste finds the form to express itself---with words, fabric, code, or light. Tadao Ando, a boxer turned self-taught architect, built the Church of the Light: a concrete box with a cruciform slit in the wall. It’s beautiful, but its legibility comes from our need for respite from an overstimulated existence.

Always, kindness. Paul Graham observed that mean people fail---that meanness makes you stupid, locks you into zero-sum thinking. Kindness is a type of fragile, exposed conviction---to treat another not based on how they treated you today, but to connect to who they are and why they hurt. You cannot stop their pain, but you can offer them a chance to accept and forgive their own hurt. It’s that fragility that makes it so special, that agents don’t risk. A type of soft, subtle bravery that helps us matter to one another, when our strength and intelligence no longer do.

Imagination, conviction, taste, and kindness. Maybe letting go of intelligence, with all its wry sarcasm and towering superiority, won’t be so bad. :)