The Cost Of Certainty.
Exploring how the automation of "The Answer" is eroding our capacity for critical judgement, and why reclaiming the friction of uncertainty is the new human competitive advantage.
We have become addicted to the “green checkmark.”
In the pre-AI era, a difficult decision felt like a physical weight. There was a period of “productive discomfort”, that stretching of the mental muscles as you weighed competing realities, sensed the nuance of a client’s hesitation, or identified a pattern that didn’t quite fit the quarterly report. You sat in the “grey space” of not knowing.
Now, we have “The Answer.”
Generative AI has collapsed the distance between a question and a conclusion. It offers us a gift that our evolutionary biology, programmed for energy conservation, finds irresistible: certainty. But in the modern workplace, certainty is becoming a commodity. And like all commodities, its value is plummeting.
The Feedback Loop of “Right-ish”
The danger of the current AI-mediated workplace is not that the machines are wrong. It is that they are “right enough” to be dangerous.
When you prompt a model for a strategy, it doesn’t give you the best strategy; it gives you the median strategy. It provides the statistical average of everything that has been done before. It is a mirror reflecting the “common sense” of the internet.
When we accept that output without friction, we aren’t just saving time. We are participating in a “brain heist” of our own making. We are trading our insight velocity—the speed at which we generate original thought—for output volume. We are becoming incredibly efficient at producing the unremarkable.
The Architecture of the Gray Space
We used to value “expertise,” which was a combination of knowledge and the experience of having been wrong. Today, we are replacing expertise with “verification.”
We no longer build arguments; we audit them. We don’t write; we edit. This shift is fundamental. When you build an argument from scratch, you see the structural weaknesses. You know where the load-bearing ideas are.
When you simply “verify” an AI’s output, you are looking at the surface polish, not the foundation.
If the foundation is a statistical hallucination or a generic platitude, you won’t notice until the project starts to lean. By then, your own ability to fix it has atrophied because you skipped the “struggle phase” of the work.
The Luxury of Doubt
I have spent a considerable amount of time in the consulting industry to know how valuable doubt can be, both to consultants and clients. If greed is good, doubt is better. Its long-term ROI certainly is.
If we want to build a “Humans, Inc.” mindset, we must reintroduce doubt into our operating systems. At all costs.
The most valuable people in your organisation won’t be the ones who can prompt the fastest. They will be the ones who can look at a perfectly formatted, AI-generated proposal and ask: “What perspective is absent here?” In a world of instant answers, the premium moves to the quality of the question. We need to start valuing “intentional friction.” This means:
The 20-Minute Rule: sitting with a problem for twenty minutes before involving an LLM. Forcing the brain to produce its own (perhaps messy) first draft.
The counter-prompt: actively asking the AI to argue against your favourite idea, not just to validate it.
The inefficiency premium: choosing the “inefficiency” of a face-to-face debate over the “efficiency” of an AI-generated Slack summary.
The Participation Requirement
Human intelligence does not need a “save the whales” campaign. It doesn’t need protection or subsidies. It needs participation.
As we head further into this era of effortless intelligence, remember that your competitive advantage is not your knowledge—which is being commoditised by the second—but your judgement. Judgement is a muscle. Like any muscle, it requires resistance to grow. If you outsource the resistance, the muscle atrophies.
The “heavy lifting” of thinking isn’t a tax on your productivity; it is the only thing that makes your thinking worth paying for. If a machine can provide the certainty for free, then the only thing left for you to provide is the courage to be uncertain, to explore the edges, and to find the “wrong” answer that eventually leads to the breakthrough.
The future belongs to the originators who are brave enough to sit in the grey space.
When certainty is automated, the “Green Checkmark” is the end of thought, not the goal.
Reclaim your right to be unsure. It’s where the value lives.