Why Humans No Longer Do The Work. They Decide Whether It Counts.
Machines are already doing the work. Humans now decide whether the work counts.
The fight over when AGI arrives misses the real battle: Who controls the output today?
This is not science fiction. Reports are drafted by software. Customer replies are generated automatically. Operations run through systems that only occasionally need a person to intervene. The role of the human is shifting from producer to authorizer.
More than a century ago, Thorstein Veblen described this direction in The Theory of Business Enterprise (1904). He wrote about the machine process operating once established, with workers no longer central to production. Decades later, Jeremy Rifkin warned in The End of Work (1995) that information technology would remove large portions of traditional employment. Those predictions now look less like theory and more like a preview.
Modern technology leaders openly describe the next phase. Amjad Masad talks about billion dollar companies run by one person and AI. Sam Altman and Marc Benioff have both described businesses where AI performs a large share of tasks. Elon Musk argues that eventually machines could perform nearly all work.
But the important shift is not AGI. It is responsibility.
AI produces the draft.
AI runs the process.
AI executes the task.
The human approves the result.
Managers are learning to supervise systems instead of teams. Executives are learning to direct outcomes instead of activities. Some new companies will form without traditional employees at all. They will operate as designed processes with human oversight.
So what skill actually matters?
Approval Skill: The ability to judge accuracy, risk, and acceptability. The authority moves to the person who decides if the output is allowed to exist.
System Direction: Configuring instructions, guardrails, and escalation paths so the machine produces predictable results.
Accountability Design: Creating traceable approval loops so organizations know who authorized what and why.
While engineers debate whether AGI arrives in five years or ten, you can already move into the control role today. You do not need to build AI. You need to run it.
That is why I wrote Almost AGI? The Radical Shift and How to Control It. The book explains the transition from tools to operators and gives a practical playbook for supervising automated work safely and reliably.
Do not panic about the future of jobs.
Learn the future of AI responsibility.
AI will do the work.
Someone must control it.
Read Almost AGI? The Radical Shift and How to Control it
Paperback coming soon!