#98 – Will AI Replace Humans? Answers from an Expert.

About Jonathan Aberman

Jonathan Aberman is an entrepreneur, investor, and innovation strategist who is redefining how we measure human potential in an AI-driven world. As co-founder of Hupside, Jonathan is championing a new category, Original Intelligence, that identifies and quantifies originality as a key business differentiator. With a background spanning venture capital, tech commercialization, and academia, Jonathan brings a unique perspective on emerging technologies and their economic and social impact. He is a trusted voice for leaders navigating AI transformation who want to center, not sideline, human intelligence.

Jonathan’s Links

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonathanaberman/

Company Website: www.hupside.com

SUMMARY:

Episode 98 is about whether AI will replace humans and how people should adapt, centering on shifts in workforce skills and the preservation of human originality. The host, David W. Schropfer, reviewed a McKinsey-style argument that core workforce skills remain relevant but will migrate toward problem framing, decision making, interpretation, judgment, leadership, communication, and collaboration. Jonathan Aberman argued that AI automates routine processes and produces “sameness” at scale, described architectural limits of large language models (predictable similarity and retrospective knowledge), and warned that over-reliance generates low-value content and can erode human judgment.

Jonathan placed AI in historical context as a tectonic shift that changes how value is created and captured, recommended using AI as an accelerator rather than passively, and advised learners to cultivate clearly identifiable originality or master skilled service work. He also flagged social and policy responses to AI-driven scarcity and unemployment over the next five to ten years. Jonathan described Hupside and tools for measuring originality (OIQ challenge and Hup Checker), criticized current business incentives that reallocate saved time to shareholders, contrasted U.S. and European attitudes toward policy and privacy, and noted he is working on a book and an originality product.

SHOW NOTES:

Episode 98: Will AI Replace Humans?  Answers from an Expert.

Hair on Fire 2 / 5

Everyone Human. Including those using AI

Synopsis:

AI will not eliminate most human skills—it will reconfigure how they are applied and where value is created. McKinsey’s analysis shows that over 70% of current workplace skills remain relevant across both automatable and non-automatable tasks, while only a small portion is purely human or fully automatable.

Intro:

In an article entitled, “Human skills will matter more than ever in the age of AI” by the Mackenzie global Institute (https://www.mckinsey.com/mgi/media-center/human-skills-will-matter-more-than-ever-in-the-age-of-ai) the authors argue that as AI takes over routine, execution-heavy work (e.g., data processing, basic analysis), human roles shift up the value chain toward:

• Problem framing and decision-making
• Interpretation and judgment
• Leadership, communication, and collaboration

This means that the value is created by individuals is to apply human judgment and creativity on top of AI-driven insights. As the report notes, “work activities that require expertise, interaction with stakeholders, and managing people will become more important.”

In this model, humans and AI operate as complementary partners: machines handle scale and efficiency, while humans provide context, creativity, and accountability.

Bottom line:

The future of work is not about replacing people, but about augmenting human capability. Competitive advantage will come from those who can combine technical fluency with high-order human skills—especially judgment, creativity, and leadership—rather than relying on routine execution.

Here with me to talk about all of this is Jonathan Aberman, Founder of Hupside (Human Upside), and formerly the Founding Dean of Marymount University’s College of Business Innovation, Leadership and Technology. He is a partner at VC firm Ruxton Ventures.

Question: Is AI going to replace humans?

TRANSCRIPT

0:00 – David W. Schropfer
Welcome back everybody to DIY Cyber Guy.
This is episode 98, will AI replace humans? Answers from an expert. This is a hair on fire, two out of five may be higher depending on whether or not you’re personally worried about your job being downsized or replaced in any way by AI or technology in general. This podcast, this episode is for literally every human, not just humans that work in the technology world, not just humans that use AI, but literally every human. So if you’re listening to it, this one is for you. So the synopsis is simply this. Is not going to eliminate most human skills, but it will reconfigure how those skills are applied and where that value is created. McKinsey did an analysis that shows over 70% current workforce skills remain relevant, even in the presence of AI, including non-artificial and in some cases, some automatable tasks, and also a small portion of purely human contributions that we all make every day. So to dive into that article a little bit more. So the article is entitled, Human Skills Will Matter More. Okay, let me try that again. So in this article, which is entitled, Human Skills Will Matter More, matter more than ever in the age of AI by McKinsey’s Global Institute, and the link for that is in the show notes of episode 98. The authors argue that as AI takes over routine execution, every workload, like data processing, basic analytics, the human roles are going to shift up the value chain toward a few different things. Problem framing, decision making, interpretation and judgment, and then, of course, the old classics, leadership, communication, and collaboration, things that can really only be done amongst us humans. So this means that the value that’s created by individuals is going to apply to human judgment and creativity on top of those AI-driven insights. As the report notes, and I’m quoting now, work activities that require more expertise and interaction with stakeholders. Let me try that again. As the report quotes, Work activities that require expertise, interaction with stakeholders, and managing people will actually become more important in the age of AI. So here with me to talk about all this today is Jonathan Aberman, founder of Hupside, which literally stands for Human Upside. He is the former founding dean of Marymount University’s College of Business Innovation, Leadership, and Technology, and he is a partner from the venture capital firm, Ruxin Ventures. Welcome, Jonathan.

3:17 – Jonathan Aberman
Well, David, thanks a lot for having me. And thanks to all of you for listening in. I’m going to do my best to help unpack a very thorny issue today.

3:25 – Unidentified Speaker
Excellent.

3:25 – David W. Schropfer
Well, let’s see what we can do to manage the thorns.

3:27 – Unidentified Speaker
Absolutely.

3:29 – Jonathan Aberman
So thorny question number one, is AI going to replace humans?

3:33 – David W. Schropfer
Yes and no.

3:35 – Jonathan Aberman
OK. And I think that’s a really important nuance. And frankly, a lot of the conversation right now around AI is very much framed by almost pushing that question to one side. Or elevating it to a larger extent, depending on which side of the AI human divide you’re on. And so the more nuanced answer is that AI, machine learning, Gen AI, is really, really good at ingesting and duplicating processes. That’s really what it does. And it’s been doing it for a while, and it does it better and better. And what these Gen AI models do is they are able to mimic human behavior and mimic a lot more higher level tasks than machine learning traditionally could. So if you just start with that, and then you layer on top of that agents, which are going to use the gen AI to accomplish tasks, you can see that more and more routinized activities that require higher level of fact analysis and reasoning are doable by AI.

4:39 – David W. Schropfer
So people logically are asking the question, well, geez, what’s the logical outcome?

4:44 – Jonathan Aberman
And the logical outcome, and we’ll talk about it, is that AI has certain architectural limitations in it, the biggest one being it generates sameness at scale. Its efficiency is its weakness, in other words. In a world where humans are going to be the primary consumer, when humans value novelty, because that’s how we’re wired up, there’s going to be a need for differentiation. And the need for differentiation, you describe leadership. Leadership is, hey, let’s do this. Creativity, creating something new. Basically, creating differentiation in one way or another is going to be the preserve of either really well-functioning AI that doesn’t exist today, or humans, or a combination of both. So the answer is AI won’t replace humans, but AI is going to force a different way for humans to add value than existed before AI existed. And that is probably the most honest answer.

5:39 – David W. Schropfer
Lots of impact there. I’d like to start with what you just said about AI’s efficiency is its weakness. Could you elaborate on that?

5:48 – Jonathan Aberman
Well, it’s not talked about as much as I think it should be, although the symptoms are starting to become very clear. The problem with the way that the large language models, the Gen-AIs are constructed, in order for them to operate well and be useful, they have to have at some level predictability there needs to be some sort of similarity. If you and I ask the same question, we should get roughly the same answer. You combine that with the architectural limitation that it can only report on information that exists at a time, which makes a retrospective not perspective. And what you have is this perfect storm of knowledge gathering and knowledge application that’s going to be bound by a homogenization. It’s just an architectural outcome. It’s a feature, not a bug. And it exists in every one of the large language models that exist there. It’s an architectural problem. So what you see is that now that it’s operating, you see the growing phenomenon, for example, of work slop, where people talk about AI work slop. I just got a piece of content and there’s nothing in it that’s useful. I can tell it was written by AI. That’s offensive to people because, hey, like to consume things we feel are special to us. But it’s also offensive because on some level, you know that you’re not getting anything that everybody else can’t get. So you’re hearing phenomenons of work slop. You’re hearing issues of people becoming over-reliant on AI and suffering from cognitive decline. The similarity, the sameness of it, it takes away the specialness that, frankly, people like to consume. Assume. So that’s what I’m really getting at. But it’s the sameness that allows it to operate at scale. It’s the sameness that makes an agent so attractive. I mean, if you can have an agent do the same task again and again and again and again, that’s sameness. But you don’t care. You want the sameness. So that’s why I say, will AI replace people, yes or no? Where sameness is a value, where sameness is a problem, Where the humans add value is, frankly, that’s the fault line for our society. That’s where people are going to make their money. And frankly, that’s where AI needs people. It’s at that line.

8:06 – David W. Schropfer
OK. I like trying to draw historical analogies to help people understand the size of the thing we’re talking about here. So let’s take the advent of the internet. A very short quarter century ago, all of a sudden, there was this new connectivity that was happening. It started out as brochureware, where your company could have effectively a brochure online, and then a phone number, and then a contact us form. And of course, then it’s evolved into the internet, full of commerce and other things that it is today. But that’s shifted things, right? That shifted how commerce thinks and works. It shifted how people communicate today. It shifted how meetings, very much like this one, occur. Once upon a time, you or I would have traveled to a table somewhere with two microphones on it. And now we’re simply doing this, of course, on a Zoom call from the comfort of our respective offices. So how would you compare the impact of what’s happening with AI and the adjustments, adjustment’s probably the wrong word, but the changes that it’s making to the efficacy of a professional versus quarter century ago when all of a sudden your computer was connected to every other computer on earth.

9:22 – Jonathan Aberman
So somewhat similar, but very different. And if we’re talking about historical precedent, the the issue fundamentally is, you know, economies have certain ground rules for how values created, you know, and, and there have only been in human history, a couple of moments where there was a dramatic change in how society functioned as a result of technology. So back in the midst of time, back 10,000 years or so ago, agriculture, the ability to grow food, if people live in the same place, created urbanization. I mean, the first cities in the world existed because people figured out how to plant and, you know, grow food, the wheel. Changed society. The printing press changed society. In more recent memory, the mechanization going from horsepower to steam power, machinery, were significant tectonic changes that changed the relationship between human labor and human output. And with every step of the way, humans have been able to reconfigure themselves so that they can always be part of the value chain and capture the benefit of the technology. Right? And that’s why you see these massive changes in wealth and massive changes in economy with these, quote, industrial waves. The last big industrial wave we had after steam power and mechanization really was semiconductor and computers, because that created the tectonic change in how we went from brute force labor to white collar to brute force labor to white collar to knowledge work.

11:04 – David W. Schropfer
Right.

11:05 – Jonathan Aberman
The internet was really an enablement of connecting computers in new ways to make it easier for us to operate computers at scale, the cloud and all the rest of it. The interesting, important thing to note about artificial intelligence is this is dramatically changing the value relationship between human labor and output in a way that we haven’t seen since we went from farms to factories insofar as that how we’re all going to make money, how we’re going to make our way, how we’re going to consume what we consume is now being shaped by the sameness engine that creates incredible efficiency. So you either adopt a new way to make money where you’re going to provide differentiation, or frankly, you’re going to have to answer the hard question about why do I need you if I can have a piece of software do what you do 24 for a lot less money. And so we, any of us alive today, have never experienced anything like this. And that’s what I think makes it so incredibly hard, because we’re all at sea.

12:14 – David W. Schropfer
It’s like that old joke about moving the cheese. Our cheese is being moved.

12:18 – Jonathan Aberman
We know it’s being moved. It’s scary as hell. But it seems almost inexorable. And in some ways, it kind of is. But that’s the nature of it. It is different in that regard. You know, just the thought of experiment, we tend to think about analogized internet because the AI software, we think about social media, so we analogize to software, and it makes it more familiar. But imagine if instead the technological innovation had been to suddenly allow certain I think that would change society. Sure, there’d be quite a few more of us. Or it would be unbelievable inequality, or a lot of things could happen. It’d be very interesting.

13:05 – David W. Schropfer#+#Jonathan Aberman
But my point is that that would change the nature of work, leisure, a lot of things.

13:11 – Jonathan Aberman
So my point is to say AI is explosively different because of its effect on us, not because it’s software. So it’s not analogous to the internet. Happens that the change it’s bringing is software. Does that frame it? And that’s, I think, why that’s why so many of us are sitting there and think, holy crap, how do I adjust this? This isn’t just a new technology. This is a whole new world. And then some people are saying, nah, it’s just a glorified spellchecker. Or nah, it’s just software. Nah, it’s the internet. It’s above a little end.

13:46 – David W. Schropfer
No, this is a tectonic change, whether you like it or not.

13:50 – Jonathan Aberman
That’s what I think makes it different and makes it harder to deal with.

13:54 – David W. Schropfer
Right. So you and I were speaking before we started recording and we both have, you know, children who are adults and out there in the world trying to make their way. What advice do you have you or would you give your kids about how to think about entering professional services, which like we all do, we all enter from the bottom. Nobody starts out as the president. Of a large company, unless your parents were the presidents of the large company. Exactly, and then you don’t have the skill because you didn’t earn them by the battle royale that is a career. But so how would you advise somebody entering the workforce or maybe somebody that isn’t at that managerial or C-level echelon to recalibrate rethink about the trajectory of their career.

14:49 – Jonathan Aberman
So I need to go back down a little bit of a boathole just so you know my frame of reference. The company that I’m involved in, Hupside, what we do is we measure whether or not a human or a piece of content evidences some level of originality above the baseline of what you get to AI. It’s a demonstrable signal so that somebody can stick their chest out and say, I can create something that you can’t get from Claude, or I just created is something you can get from Claude. So my frame of reference is very much shaped by the experience and seeing how people can drive themselves to use their ability to think to create or manage to do something that’s atypical. And atypical can mean just a simple tweak in how you do your job, or it can be simply just being pleasant to somebody in a meeting, or it can be a brand new invention. There are a lot of different ways that we show people respect of being original or having them be original with us, okay? I think that originality, as we can identify it, is the currency of society. I mean, think about it. Whatever we do in life, we’re trying to be safe or we’re trying to be experiencing something that makes us feel special or do something special or get something special. That’s the desire for novelty.

16:05 – David W. Schropfer#+#Jonathan Aberman
Originality is the output, that thing, the currency.

16:09 – Jonathan Aberman
So I’m involved at a university right now as an executive resident. So I’m in the classroom. I loved staying in the classroom when I was a dean. And what I’m telling all my students is I don’t care how you get there, but you need to accomplish a few things. A, you need to understand that you need to use AI as a way to accelerate your ability to differentiate. In other words, if you get in a closed doom loop where you just basically ask AI what to think, it will tell you. It’ll tell you really well, and that gets your best is designed to do, be your friend.

16:41 – David W. Schropfer#+#Jonathan Aberman
So you have to be critical.

16:42 – Jonathan Aberman
You have to push it and push it and push it and engage in a dialogue and tell them that’s wrong. You can’t. So number one is start to use it as a tool to use it a lot. Don’t run from it because your competitors, the people in your generation that use it well, they’re going to outperform you.

16:59 – David W. Schropfer
They’ll be more original than you because they will take their natural ability and enhance it.

17:03 – Jonathan Aberman
So that’s two. Three, try to find a career where you can differentiate yourself on some specialness. And what I say is, you know, if you want to be a knowledge worker, understand you’re going to have to be at the edge. You’re going to have to push yourself. Being a knowledge worker is not going to be a place where you’re going to be able to phone it in. If you want to figure out how to live without a lot of money, live on a farm or do something that’s not going to require you to be very special, but don’t think you’re going to be able to have a white collar life without an edge. Or if you don’t want to play that game, I believe that the world that we’re gonna come into is gonna value individual excellence a lot more. What I mean by that is, be a really good plumber, be a really good waiter, be a really good home care person, be really good teacher, I don’t care.

17:48 – David W. Schropfer#+#Jonathan Aberman
Right, right.

17:49 – Jonathan Aberman
But be good at something that you can’t get through repetitive task. And, you know, the good news is it’s an easy message to deliver. The bad news is we’re all as parents and mentors fighting against a massive problem, which is frankly, social media addiction. And that a lot of our students have been trained to look at information and the internet as a passive activity or a multiplayer game. And we’re serving up this technology, which I said before, could have been life extension. It’s a tectonic change, but they’re consuming it like it’s a social media tool. And actually, last thing I’ll say about that is if you look at the usage of Claude, in particular Anthropic, is here’s how people are using it, the number two usage are chat, search, because people so I really think that as parents break them of social media addiction, point out that they’re 40% of them are addicted in high school, break them of that addiction, teach them to make eye contact, don’t want to bring the phone to dinner, get out of the frickin house, everybody detoxes for the afternoon. And then when you get to college, send them a college that doesn’t treat AI like a cheating problem. Tell them to go to a college place that treats AI as a part of training the student, where they’re going to train the student how to think with AI. And just that’s the best advice I can give. Detox and then encourage. Because the ones that get this joke will be very employable in a post-AI world. And the ones that don’t, I fear for. Honestly, I do.

19:22 – David W. Schropfer
That’s an excellent segmentation. The ones that don’t get the joke And the joke is exactly what you just said. Simply, if you believe everything it tells you and you believe that’s whatever result AI gives you, then you’re playing into the same joke of social media that the rosy presentation that somebody is making of their life or of their accomplishments in texts and photos is hardly a representation of who that person really is, not a scratch of a scratch on a surface of who that person is. So that’s the joke. But it’s all just a facade. And I love your point of you’ve really got to look behind that curtain. You have to challenge AI to give you either explore the answer you’re looking for, but make your own decision based on the information it’s able to mine, or leverage the fact that it can do some menial tasks and repetitive tasks for you with you at the command center, not AI in the command center. If you turn over the executive function, the executive decision to AI, you will be worthless in the workplace. And that’s the people we fear for. Listen, it’s a fundamental truth of humanity.

20:35 – Jonathan Aberman
is that we compete for scarce resources. That’s what humans do.

20:42 – David W. Schropfer
And we can soften it.

20:44 – Jonathan Aberman
We can manage it. We can civilize our way out of it. But at the end of the day, when you look at society as an organizing principle, the people who have scarcity and can keep and provide scarcity are the ones that benefit in a society. They either create scarcity through authoritarianism and through grabbing resources, or you create scarcity through a competition, people are free to compete. And those two Libras explain basically the entirety of human history. Everybody now is in a world where, like it or not, scarcity value is going to be in the hands of people who can create something that AI can’t. And what it’s going to do, it’s going to raise the bar. And it’s going to be really punishing. People who are worried about larger unemployment, you know what? You should be worried about that because it’s a real thing. What society does about that is going to be a big, big issue for the next 5, 10 years. But if I’m talking and you’re talking about giving a young person or an older person advice about how to compete, understand that this society will value scarcity more, not less, because AI is going to commoditize things. So look, we can understand. We see it. People are going to go here to concerts and pay a lot of money to hear artists who perform original music, even if AI drowns us music on Spotify, right? We’re going to value great athletes, but on a lower level, who are you going to go to for service, your local business where you’re talking with a human or an agent?

22:14 – David W. Schropfer
Which company can do business with, the company who you can’t get anybody on the phone with or company where there’s somebody on the phone who’s well trained?

22:20 – Jonathan Aberman
I could go on.

22:23 – David W. Schropfer
Scarcity is going to be available to all of us if we apply ourselves.

22:27 – Jonathan Aberman
And if we do, we’ll make money and we’ll gather resources. I will be valuable. But that’s going to be the big adjustment. It’s going to require a higher level of engagement and a higher level of personal accountability that, frankly, a lot of our young people and older people haven’t had to deal with. And if you add on top of that the compounding factor of we live in an environment where there are forces in our world where there’s money to be made by allowing people to be passive and reward them for being passive, it’s a perfect story. You know, so you got to keep your head in a swivel every day, is what I would say. Every day.

23:04 – Unidentified Speaker
Absolutely.

23:05 – David W. Schropfer
Yeah. Well, let’s end it there, Jonathan. I think you did a great job of navigating the thorny issue that we talked about at the top of the interview. But I’d like to leave it here. Where can people find out more about what you do?

23:20 – Jonathan Aberman
Well, definitely go and check out Hupside, humanupside.com, and we have a couple ways that you can learn about your own original intelligence. There’s an OIQ challenge you can play, and you can find out how you perform against AI, or you can try out the Hup Checker and do it with a bunch of your friends. It makes a great drinking game, by the way. I actually find getting people together and trying to find the most bizarre answers to a question is actually quite entertaining. You can follow me on LinkedIn. I tend to post there, and I promise everything I post, I actually write.

23:54 – David W. Schropfer
So you’ll get the way I work slop out of me.

23:57 – David W. Schropfer#+#Jonathan Aberman
And you know, look, this is a mission. It’s a movement.

24:02 – Jonathan Aberman
And I just want all your followers, listeners to know, because I know a lot of you are out there trying to make things happen day to day. That’s the nature of the show. People understand that this is a real problem. And not everybody is willing to accept that AI is deterministically going to make us all irrelevant. I object to that. My partners in this injector, investors There are a lot of people that don’t want AI to be the deterministic thing that shapes our world. So don’t lose heart, is what I would say. Don’t lose heart.

24:31 – Unidentified Speaker
Perfect.

24:32 – David W. Schropfer
Perfect. And if anybody missed any of the links that Jonathan just talked about, just go to diycyberguy.com, look for episode 9898, and you will find all the links, including the link to Jonathan’s company. So Jonathan, thanks so much for joining us. It’s really been great having you.

24:51 – Jonathan Aberman
Loved meeting you. Thanks for letting me do it, David. Appreciate it.