AI is very good at making people look productive.
A report appears. A summary appears. A slide outline appears. A polite email appears, somehow with the phrase “just circling back” even though nobody asked for that energy.
At first, this feels like magic.
Then it becomes normal.
Then the question changes.
If everyone can draft faster, summarise faster, and produce decent-looking work faster, what actually separates good work from average work?
I think the answer is judgment.
Annoying, I know. The hard part remains the hard part.
AI can help produce the thing. It cannot always tell you whether the thing matters. It can generate options, but someone still has to choose. It can explain a paper, but someone still has to decide whether the claim is important, whether the evidence is strong, and whether the conclusion survives contact with reality.
This is why AI makes human judgment more visible.
Before, people could hide behind effort. “I spent all night on this.” Very noble. Very sleep-deprived.
Now, effort is less impressive by itself. If AI can help produce a draft in minutes, the value shifts to the thinking behind it.
Why this question?
Why this argument?
Why this decision?
What did you reject?
What did you notice that the AI missed?
That is where expertise shows up.
This makes me slightly uncomfortable, because judgment is harder to teach, harder to measure, and harder to fake.
But maybe that is a good thing.
My reflection is this: AI does not remove the need to think. It removes some of the places where weak thinking used to hide. The future may not belong to people who can produce the most. It may belong to people who know what is worth producing.