Competing with AI
The ability to "be human" is going to be an important competitive advantage, as shown in the unique perspectives of the Pogo cartoons.
I inherited a large collection of Walt Kelly's Pogo cartoon books from my father. They are treasured!
Kelsey did a good job summing it up...
Kelsey Ruger:
When you think about Roger Troutman, Pink Floyd, or Björk what makes them impossible for AI to truly replicate isn't just technical skill. It's that they bring something uniquely human to their work. They work at intersections. They embed context and emotion and lived experience in ways that can't be averaged.
The future doesn't belong to people who can compete with AI at being consistent, efficient, and optimized. It belongs to people who are magnificently, irreducibly human.
You can't force this. You can't optimize your way to it. But you can create the conditions. You can explore unexpected domains. You can bring your complete, weird, specific self to your work.
You can resist being averaged.
And in a world that's increasingly optimized for the statistical mean, that might be the most valuable thing you can do.
We’re Already Unlearnable. AI Is Proving It.
Over the last couple of months I’ve spent a lot of time working with the music generation tool Suno. That experimentation crystallized something that should have been obvious in hindsight.
Kelsey Ruger
