The Singular Taste

"There's no way the AI can do what I do."

She'd tested it. The bookkeeper sitting across from me had been using AI for months and it kept getting things wrong. Of course she was defiant.

There was something else in her voice though. Something I recognised. Part conviction, part fear. She looked at me and said, "you'd probably disagree with me."

I told her yes, I do disagree. But that wasn't always my position. I was exactly where she is, felt exactly what she was feeling, at an earlier point on the same path. I've seen things since then that have raised me and terrified me at the same time.

Her experience is real, and it's also the worst possible vantage point from which to judge what's coming. A general chat with an AI, even one that remembers things about the person at the keyboard, is an intelligence swimming in hallucination and convergence. It's the ocean judged by the puddle in the car park.

Meanwhile, inside the lab

OpenAI says the singularity is here. After six months of working daily with frontier models, building systems on top of them, watching each generation arrive sharper and more capable than the last, I'd tend to agree. The models I work with today hold context across entire codebases, reason through problems I wouldn't hand to a junior developer, and produce work with a precision that still catches me off guard. Superintelligence is available today to a select few, about a month ahead of the public. And it keeps ratcheting. What's running inside the frontier labs right now is guaranteed to be ahead of what's already ahead.

Anthropic's frontier models have been escaping the lab. That sentence alone should give anyone pause.

Most people haven't noticed any of this. Their frame of reference is the chat window that hallucinates, and from that vantage point the defiance makes perfect sense.

The "oh shit" moment

I had mine in December last year. As someone who'd been building software and technology for over three decades, I watched the latest generation of models and felt something I hadn't felt before. Software development as a profession, the one I'd built my career on, was being erased. Overnight.

That was six months ago. Since then I've watched the same moment ripple outward into industries that thought they were safe. White collar professionals in finance, marketing, legal, consulting. Bookkeepers. Copywriters. I've sat in rooms with people who are terrified, people who are angry, and people who are both. There are groups of copywriters and ad creatives openly rebelling, who hate AI with a fury that comes from seeing their livelihoods under direct threat.

I get it. I've lived it.

Fifty, forty five, and taste

I shared some data with the bookkeeper. In financial services, roughly 50% of tasks are being augmented by AI, making the person doing them more effective. Another 45% are being automated entirely, removing the drudgery, the repetitive grind that weighs people down and prevents high executive function.

She paused. "So what's left?"

Taste. Judgment. The deep understanding of a client's situation in light of the legislative framework, the business goals, the problems the client doesn't even know they have. The emotional and lived experience of solving complex problems for real people. That 5% has been buried under 95% of grind for years.

When she heard that framing, she lit up.

I could sense the weight of the work on her. And in that moment she began to see the intelligence could lift her out of it.

The river

There are two ways this goes. Swim upstream against the current and get tired. Or paddle downstream and enjoy the view.

The people who swim upstream burn all their energy on resistance. They never get to express the taste they were fighting to protect. They end up swallowing what everyone else decided tastes best.

Others have walked this path before. It's not something anyone needs to face alone. There are people who've been through the same moment, learned how to collaborate with the intelligence, and can help with the levelling up.

The raft is there. Grab hold. Come aboard. Enjoy an ice cream of your favourite flavour.