The Rise of the Know-Nothing Kings

I spilled half a cup of lukewarm coffee on some corporate sermon from Forbes this morning. The screen flickered, the cheap paper stuck to the desk in a brown, pulpy mess, and for a second, I thought it was an improvement. The headline was one of those chin-stroking specials, something about the skills AI can’t replace. The kind of thing a consultant writes to make sure he still has a job next year.

The premise is simple enough for a drunk to understand. The wizards of code and capital have built a machine that’s very good at doing the scut work. The entry-level crap. The stuff that grinds you down and builds you up all at once. And now some folks are wringing their hands, wondering where the next generation of bosses will come from if nobody ever has to do the dirty work first.

Dario Amodei from Anthropic—one of the outfits building these digital gods—warns about the “mass elimination of jobs.” He says it like it’s a weather report, a hurricane heading for the coast. But it’s not a hurricane, it’s a product. They’re not predicting the storm; they’re selling it. They’ve bottled the lightning and now they’re charging you to stand in the rain.

The whole thing is sold under the banner of “efficiency.” A beautiful, clean word. It sounds like a freshly mopped floor. But I’ve been around long enough to know that “efficiency” is just a five-dollar word for firing someone. It means the organization gets “leaner.” Leaner. Like a stray dog. Like a man who’s been drinking his dinner for a month. It means fewer bodies, more spreadsheets, and a whole lot more pressure on whoever’s left standing.

I had to light a cigarette just to process the sheer corporate poetry of it all. They’re worried they’re “eliminating the lived experience that feeds our leadership pipelines.” Lived experience. You see, they have a term for it now. A nice, sterile, LinkedIn-friendly term for suffering. For dealing with the public, for cleaning up someone else’s mess, for learning that the rules on paper are a joke compared to the real rules people live and die by.

This article I’m wiping coffee off of trots out some expert, a woman named TaQuonda Hill, to explain it all. She talks about empathy. Says if you’ve done the job, you understand the people doing it. No shit. It’s like saying if you’ve been punched in the face, you understand what a fist feels like. Of course you do. You remember the sting, the surprise, the taste of blood. That’s not empathy, that’s just memory. But in the corner office, memory is a liability. They don’t want leaders who remember what it’s like in the gutter. They want leaders who’ve only ever seen the gutter from a penthouse window.

They bring up Boeing. A perfect, tragic example. The suits outsourced the engineering, chased speed and savings, and lost track of the goddamn plane. They gutted the “institutional memory,” the article says. They cut out the guys who knew, deep in their bones, that a certain bolt needed a certain twist, not because a manual said so, but because they’d seen what happens when it doesn’t get it. They replaced lived experience with a balance sheet, and the sky fell in.

And here’s the real gut-punch. The solution these geniuses are proposing isn’t to stop gutting the damn jobs. No, that would make too much sense. Instead, they want to simulate the experience. This TaQuonda woman, bless her heart, talks about “leadership labs.” Treating leadership like “product development.” Intentional. Resourced. Iterated.

My god. I need a drink just thinking about it. They want to create a laboratory to replicate the chaos of a Burger King on a Saturday night. They want to A/B test a personality. They’re going to put a bunch of 24-year-old MBAs in a sterile room and give them a “simulation” of dealing with an angry customer or a lazy coworker. It’s the most absurd thing I’ve ever heard. It’s like trying to learn about love by reading a greeting card.

You don’t learn to lead in a “lab.” You learn to lead when your car won’t start and you’re already late for a job you hate. You learn to lead when you have to convince a 300-pound trucker that his package isn’t lost, it’s just buried under a mountain of other people’s miserable lives. You learn it when you have to choose between paying rent and fixing your teeth.

You learn it by navigating the thousand tiny, un-simulatable humiliations and triumphs of a real life.

The article says AI makes work “transactional,” but leadership is “relational.” Another gem. Of course it is. It’s about convincing other broken, beautiful, selfish, and occasionally heroic human beings to row in the same direction, even when the boat is taking on water and the captain is drunk. An AI can’t do that. An AI can calculate the precise trajectory of a sinking ship, but it can’t tell a joke to keep the crew’s spirits up. It doesn’t know how to share a cigarette in silence with someone who’s just had their heart broken.

Here’s the part they’re all missing, the twist in the gut that makes the whole thing a black comedy. They think this is a problem to be solved. An unforeseen consequence. They think they’ve accidentally created a generation of leaders who’ve never felt the heat of the forge.

But what if it’s not an accident?

What if this is the whole point?

Think about it. A leader with “lived experience” is a pain in the ass. They ask questions. They push back. They say things like, “Wait a minute, if we do this, it’s going to screw over the people in shipping,” because they remember being screwed over in shipping. They have context. They have scars. They’re difficult.

But a leader raised on an AI “escalator,” as the article calls it? A leader who’s never had to climb the stairs? They’re perfect. They’re blank slates. They see a dashboard, not a factory floor. They see data points, not human faces. They’ll look at an AI’s recommendation to fire 20% of the workforce to boost quarterly profits and they won’t feel a thing. Why would they? They’ve never been part of the 20%. The AI is logical. The numbers make sense. It’s just a transaction.

They’re not accidentally destroying the leadership pipeline. They’re building a new one, custom-made for a world run by algorithms. They don’t want kings who have bled. They want priests who just read the sacred text spat out by the machine. Compliant, clean, and utterly devoid of the messy, inconvenient thing they call humanity.

So they can build their “leadership labs” and run their “simulations.” They can try to distill the human soul into a flowchart. Let them. Some of us will still be here, in the real world, learning things in the only lab that’s ever mattered: the one filled with cheap beer, bad decisions, and the beautiful, terrible noise of other people.

They’re worried about outsourcing their bench. The truth is, they’ve already outsourced their soul.

Time to see if this whiskey can run a simulation of its own.

-H.C.

Source: The Skills AI Hasn’t Replaced - And Why Your Future Depends On Them