This morning I happened upon an article describing how chimps, too, wage war. They use stones, clubs, and sticks. On each other. On each other’s children.

Terrible.

And all too human.

It’s wild: while AI Labs are using high-brow technology to amplify our cerebral side, the guy in the oval office is running away from his life as a sex offender and into a war that’s about nothing more than being alpha male.

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AI has tasks, people have jobs.

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I was sitting in a hotel lobby the other day, working. I had 4 Claude Code agents simultaneously running tasks in the terminal of my MacBook Pro.

The waiters know me there, my Latte arrives without asking.

At another table, some feet away, two people were discussing business. I couldn’t quite make out what they were talking about, they were planning something. Eventually, they were joined by a third person. The decision-maker?

That’s when I suddenly realise this simple truth: AI is taking over tasks, not jobs.

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Why people love their jobs is because it’s more than a set of tasks.

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In a substack article on the future of work, econ blogger Noah Smith says this exact thing: “AI is replacing tasks, not jobs.”

What he says about the corporate employees of Japan is most interesting. They’re not job-hoppers. They’re stayers, but in varying jobs within the company.

We have a client that regularly holds what is internally called “the carousel”.

Employees switch roles; you’ve been marketing manager, now lead the sales department. Or lead customer service. Or finances.

After some time, all of middle management has the knowledge of all operations of all departments in their heads.

And the company is embedded in their hearts. They would never leave, even if they do, it’s to a partner company.

They might use AI to create proposals or reports in minutes rather than hours. So what? All the more time to sit around and discuss the future of their company.

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Becoming a master of lived experience will have you thrive in the age of AI.

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At our company, we have a program called “Becoming Masters”.

Masters of what? Not masters of tasks.

As our most experienced software engineer explains, it’s about bringing real live issues to the table that real live people have when doing their jobs.

Talk to them, the potential users of your software, walk with them. Internalise their experiences. Then build something great for them that takes away the pain of their most arduous tasks.

And yes, by all means, have AI do the task of writing code.

Forgot about AI having your job. It can’t. It’s like asking a hammer to write philosophy.

The insight that AI does tasks, not jobs, gives a clear view moving forward. It’s our responsibility to decide that the tasks it does is to the benefit for us people. All of us.

Header image: Jan Steen, The Dancing Couple, 1663