Author’s note · 2025-12-26
AI Won't Replace You
Its natural to worry about AI replacing the human touch. We argue that the future isnt about replacement, but partnership.
The replacement question is the one everybody asks first, and Ore's position is that it is the wrong question asked with real feeling behind it. The fear is legitimate. The frame it arrives in is not.
Replacement assumes the machine does your job the way you do it, only cheaper. Partnership assumes something less flattering and more accurate: parts of the job were always clerical, the machine takes those, and what remains is the part that needed judgment all along.
That is not a comfort. It is a redistribution, and it exposes how much of any given role was clerical to begin with. The people who feel it least are the ones who had already located the judgment in their own work.
He writes this from inside the arrangement rather than about it. The systems running his companies were built to take the clerical layer off a founder who does not have departments to hand it to, which is the same argument he makes at length in the Licklider essay.
The honest version of the claim is not that AI will not replace you. It is that the partnership has to be deliberately built, most people have not started building it, and the gap between those two groups is what the next few years will actually sort.