Meritocracy was always a flawed god. In the age of AI, it is a god that eats its own priests. The good news: the way out has been inside you all along — filed under “bugs.”
Let me say the quiet part out loud: the people who turned everything into a metric are about to be measured out of a job.
For thirty years, the high priests of meritocracy have run the world on one creed: your value is your output. They ranked the schools, gamified the workplaces, quantified the humans. They optimized supply chains until they snapped, optimized attention until we could no longer read a book, and optimized work until burnout became a business model. They broke a great deal of the world — and were promoted for it, because the dashboard was green.
And now comes the punchline of the century. The machine has arrived — the perfect meritocrat, the ultimate optimizer, tireless, scalable, and cheap. And it is coming first for the very people who built their identity on being exactly that. If your entire professional worth is speed, throughput, and flawless information processing, congratulations: you have spent your career writing the job description for your own replacement.
Max Tegmark warned in “Life 3.0” of a “race to the bottom.” Everyone read it as a warning about labs and nations cutting corners. Wrong lens. The most brutal race to the bottom runs inside our performance reviews. When we compete with machines in the arena of output, we must strip away everything slow, messy, and human just to stay in the game. We are optimizing ourselves into second-rate copies of our own algorithms — and calling it a career.
Exhibit 1 — The arena you cannot win. The gap is not your failure. It is the yardstick.
THE HERESY: YOUR BUGS ARE THE POINT
Here is where I will lose the productivity influencers, and I could not care less. Everything the meritocratic machine tries to optimize away — your emotions, your mistakes, your slowness, your vulnerability, your unquantifiable hunches — is not waste. It is, as Eve Poole argues in “Robot Souls,” the seat of the human soul. She calls it our “junk code.” And I will go one step further:
Junk code is the mother of invention. It is humanity’s rescue from the race to the bottom.
Do not take my word for it. Take history’s. Penicillin was a contaminated petri dish — a mistake. The Post-it was a glue that failed. The microwave was a chocolate bar melting in an engineer’s pocket. X-rays, vulcanized rubber, the pacemaker: accidents, detours, hunches nobody could defend in a steering committee. Every breakthrough in your industry began its life as something a KPI system would have killed in the first quarter.
A machine optimizes toward the probable. Innovation is, by definition, a bet on the improbable. So when the meritocrats run an organization as a pure optimization problem, they are not building the future. They are systematically deleting the only code that ever produced one. That is how they broke the world. And that is why the future will not be led by them.
Exhibit 2 — Junk code, decompiled. What the technocrat deletes, the inventor compiles.
TWO IMAGES, ONE CHOICE
Strip the debate to its core and you find two competing images of the human being.
The first is Imago Hominis — the image of man. AI is a mirror: it reflects our language, our biases, and above all our obsession with productivity. When we worship AI’s output, we are worshipping our own efficiency, amplified and sold back to us. It is the oldest mistake in the book with a new interface: building an idol and kneeling before it.
The second is Imago Dei — the image of God. Call it theology, call it ontological dignity, call it whatever lets you sleep: it is the claim that your worth is inherent and utterly independent of your IQ, your title, or your processing power. One of these images can be benchmarked. The other cannot. That is precisely the point. A dignity that could be measured could also be revoked — by the next model release.
WHERE THE MACHINE CANNOT FOLLOW
Real human existence — and real creation — happens in three places no algorithm can enter.
Relationship. Martin Buber’s I–Thou: you become a self only in mutual encounter with another. AI can simulate empathy — we have politely named the phenomenon “sycophancy” — but it cannot keep vigil at your hospital bed. There is nothing it is like to be a language model.
Judgment. Moral and creative judgment cannot be reduced to calculation. It requires a conscience, taste, and scars. No model has skin in the game.
Meaning. AI has no “aboutness.” It can generate a thousand poems about love while wanting nothing, risking nothing, mourning nothing. Meaning without intention is just recombination at scale.
Bildtext: Exhibit 3 — Choose your race. One has a bottom. The other has a lightbulb.
THE HANDOVER
So here is my provocation to every board, every school, and every exhausted high performer reading this between meetings: the era of the pure meritocrat is ending, and it is ending at the hands of its own creation. The optimizers will be optimized away. What remains — what becomes more valuable with every model release — is the original: the person with judgment, relationships, taste, and the courage to bet on the improbable.
Stop asking how to be more efficient. Start asking what is sufficient — and pour everything you save into the race machines cannot enter: originality, encounter, judgment. Protect the junk code in your people the way you protect your IP, because that is exactly what it is: the only intellectual property no competitor can copy and no model can compute.
The race to the bottom ends only when we refuse to run it — and start inventing instead. Your value is not in your output. It never was. Your value is in the fact that you are an image of the Divine: messy, slow, unquantifiable, and gloriously inefficient.
Are you ready to stop being a bad processor — and start being an original?
GO DEEPER — ON SUBSTACK
The full essay, “Meritocracy: The Race to the Bottom,” is published next week on my Substack, “I Am — In the Age of Machines” — with Tegmark, Eve Poole, Martin Buber, and Leo XIV’s Magnifica Humanitas. Long-form. No shortcuts. For those who dare, and who still have the capacity for sustained thought — not for those hunting the next tick-tock of dopamine.
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