You Cannot Automate Wisdom

I know I will piss off the AI lovers here, and that’s fine. This needs to be said.

What is being quietly erased from the conversation is the question of where AI actually comes from. Well, every impressive response, every polished paragraph, every confident recommendation is built on the experience, hard-won judgment, and creative work of real people—often the very experts now being sidelined, devalued, and quietly ripped off in the name of efficiency.

No, your favorite AI did not create this. It did not invent that knowledge. It absorbed it. Scraped it. Averaged it. Reassembled it. Then, it was presented back as something totally new, detached from the humans who paid for that understanding with decades of work, failure, learning, and accountability. The human was removed from the transaction, but never from the source.

So yes, enjoy AI for a while. It is fast. It is convenient. It feels magical. But systems like this only work as long as fresh, original human knowledge continues to flow into them. When people stop sharing insight, stop publishing real thinking, stop teaching from lived experience—because they are no longer paid, trusted, or valued—the system begins to starve.

And when it starves, it eats itself.

It starts recycling blog posts written by other AI systems. It trains on articles derived from earlier AI-generated summaries. It cites papers that were inspired by outputs that never truly understood the problem in the first place. The signal degrades. Context disappears. Confidence remains. That is not intelligence. That is recursion, and it will get ugly.

AI, as it exists today, is an impressive data query and pattern-matching engine over existing material. It does not create the next idea. It does not produce a breakthrough. It does not replace judgment formed under pressure, in uncertainty, with consequences attached. Those things come from humans who have skin in the game.

Treating AI like it will somehow leap beyond its training without humans doing the hard work underneath is not optimism. It is stupidity.

If organizations want AI to have a future beyond remixing yesterday’s thinking, then they need to start re-growing real knowledge workers. Protect them. Pay them. Credit them. Create systems that cultivate expertise rather than extract it for future profit or efficiency. Otherwise, AI becomes a frozen artifact—a product of pre-2025 human knowledge, endlessly reprocessed, slowly decaying to the end of most companies.

You cannot automate wisdom and then be surprised when it disappears! This is the next decade.