what AI removes

I spent an afternoon talking with my AI system about where AI is taking us. Starting the conversation about the customer journey: decisions, purchases, supply chains. The whole picture. The basics of our economy.

That sounds like a strange loop – asking the machine about the machine. It was. But it’s also the most honest way I know to think about this right now. What you’re reading is what I did with that conversation. Not what the AI said. What I made of it.

Here’s where we started.

In a few years, your AI will buy your shoes. It knows how much you ran (your smartwatch told it), knows your budget, your preferences and more. When the old pair hits 600 kilometers, it talks to three retailers’ AI systems, picks the best deal, and orders it for you. You get one notification: “New shoes arriving Thursday. Proceed or not?”

You won’t say no. Why would you? These new shoes are good. The price is right. The system works.

Multiply that by everything in your life: groceries, insurance, energy contracts, travel. Demand and supply matched before you even feel the demand or realize you needed it. Factories producing what will actually be bought, not what might be. Almost no waste. Almost no friction. An economy running at close to 100% efficiency.

Here’s the thing I kept coming back to in our conversation:

this AI system changes nothing.

Not nothing in your daily life – that changes a lot in a certain way. But nothing fundamental. It’s the same economy we already have. Same logic, same goal, same scorecard. Buy more, produce more, grow more. GDP with the brakes removed. AI doesn’t replace the system. It perfects it. Supply and demand are best friends now.

And the brakes on this economic decision process, it turns out, were us. The humans.

Our hesitation. The moment in the shop where you hold something and think: do I actually need this? That pause was never designed into the economy. It was unintended. Sort of a human inefficiency. Sand in the gears.

But that pause was also where your values lived. The human part in this equation.

Think about it. The decision not to buy. The choice for the repairable one over the cheap one. The “let me sleep on it.” Every one of those moments was friction from the economy’s point of view – and reflection from yours. The classical system tolerated your values because it had no choice. You were in the loop.

Automation by AI takes you out of the loop. Not in a harsh way. The AI notification makes it so convenient. And the pause doesn’t move somewhere else. It just disappears. It’s gone.

So the question isn’t whether AI will run the economy. It will, and mostly better and more efficient than we did. The question is what happens to everything that used to live in the pauses. The human elements.

Then, in that same conversation, the question turned around on me. I had been asking the AI where all this is heading. The honest answer it kept circling back to: that depends on what you tell it to do. These systems optimize whatever they’re told to optimize. Price, speed, convenience – those are just defaults. Parameters someone put in.

Optimize for what? And for whom?

That question isn’t new. We just never had to answer it ourselves – we left it to the economy. And the economy always gave the same answer: more. Always more. So “more” is the only answer we’ve ever practiced. It’s the context we were raised in. The difference now is that the machine puts the question to us directly. What matters? For whom? And these are not small questions. We’re not used to answering them. We never really had to.

That’s the part worth losing sleep over. Not that the machines get too powerful –

but that they’ll ask us what matters, and we won’t know what to answer.

And here’s the catch the conversation with my AI system ended on. If the human elements are gone, where do our values come in? They have to be handed to the machine upfront. As instructions. But you can’t instruct a machine with something you can’t name. “A good life” is not an instruction. Vague values become default values – and the defaults now are price, speed, more.

So before anything else, we need a shared vocabulary for what makes life good.

Concrete enough to point at, to discuss, maybe even to measure. So that not only the AI system has direction – we have it too. For our economy, and in the end, for our society.

That’s where the next post will take us. Because we’ve been working on exactly that.