Recently, I’ve been thinking about judgment in the Intelligence Economy and asking a question that I believe will become increasingly important: If AI can generate intelligence, how do humans continue to develop judgment?
Part of the answer is experience. We spend a lot of time thinking about how to get selected, by the right university, the right company, for the right promotion, into the right room, or by the right investor. The Intelligence Economy points toward a different strategy: become exceptionally good at something valuable.
That is ultimately a philosophy of agency. Don’t wait for a university to make you valuable, an employer to give you experience, or someone else to recognize your potential. And don’t assume that accumulating credentials will automatically translate into capability. Instead, develop practical skills, take on difficult problems, create things, experiment, write, research, sell, and lead. Most importantly, put yourself in situations where the outcome is uncertain, the responsibility is real, and the consequences matter, because that is where experience is gained and judgment is built.
Credentials tell us something about where a person has been and what they have been exposed to. A body of work demonstrates what they can actually do. Judgment reveals what they choose to do when the answer isn’t obvious.
That distinction becomes increasingly important as information is more abundant and accelerates capabilities that once took years to acquire. When everyone has access to extraordinary intelligence, simply knowing more becomes less differentiating. Curiosity, execution, adaptability, domain expertise, experience, and judgment become more valuable because they determine whether intelligence actually produces an outcome.
The objective shouldn’t be to build a career around continually being selected by someone else. Build enough capability, experience, reputation, and evidence that eventually the relationship begins to reverse and opportunity starts looking for you.
Then comes the harder part: developing enough judgment to recognize which of those opportunities deserve a yes and which deserve a no. That is agency, not eliminating dependence on other people, but developing enough capability and judgment that you increasingly have the power to choose.