Drawing on Cory Doctorow's insight, the immediate risk for workers isn't being replaced by a competent AI, but by an incompetent one. AI only needs to be good enough to convince a manager to fire a human, leading to a lose-lose situation of job loss and declining work quality.

As AI evolves from single-task tools to autonomous agents, the human role transforms. Instead of simply using AI, professionals will need to manage and oversee multiple AI agents, ensuring their actions are safe, ethical, and aligned with business goals, acting as a critical control layer.

A key challenge in AI adoption is not technological limitation but human over-reliance. 'Automation bias' occurs when people accept AI outputs without critical evaluation. This failure to scrutinize AI suggestions can lead to significant errors that a human check would have caught, making user training and verification processes essential.

Avoid deploying AI directly into a fully autonomous role for critical applications. Instead, begin with a human-in-the-loop, advisory function. Only after the system has proven its reliability in a real-world environment should its autonomy be gradually increased, moving from supervised to unsupervised operation.

Despite hype in areas like self-driving cars and medical diagnosis, AI has not replaced expert human judgment. Its most successful application is as a powerful assistant that augments human experts, who still make the final, critical decisions. This is a key distinction for scoping AI products.

The most dangerous long-term impact of AI is not economic unemployment, but the stripping away of human meaning and purpose. As AI masters every valuable skill, it will disrupt the core human algorithm of contributing to the group, leading to a collective psychological crisis and societal decay.

Society holds AI in healthcare to a much higher standard than human practitioners, similar to the scrutiny faced by driverless cars. We demand AI be 10x better, not just marginally better, which slows adoption. This means AI will first roll out in controlled use cases or as a human-assisting tool, not for full autonomy.

While the caring economy is often cited as a future source of human jobs, AI's ability to be infinitely patient gives it an "unfair advantage" in roles like medicine and teaching. AI doctors already receive higher ratings for bedside manner, challenging the assumption that these roles are uniquely human.

As AI systems become infinitely scalable and more capable, humans will become the weakest link in any cognitive team. The high risk of human error and incorrect conclusions means that, from a purely economic perspective, human cognitive input will eventually detract from, rather than add to, value creation.