On Building a Moat: An AI Future Worth Thinking About

I've been turning this topic over in my head for a while now — not just the technology of it, but what it means for me, personally, somewhere down the line. I think it's something everyone should sit with seriously, at least once: where will you, as an individual, actually stand in that probable future?

There are a couple of debates worth working through first.

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Two Camps

One camp says AI will simply take over the jobs. The other says it won't be AI taking your job so much as someone who knows how to use AI taking it instead. People who adapt outpace people who don't — that's the argument, anyway.

One anchor for the second camp is history. Plenty of technological leaps have triggered the same fear before — that jobs would vanish entirely. In hindsight, most of those jobs simply evolved, plenty of new ones got created, and a fair number of the old ones are still around. But would that hold true if what shows up next is something closer to a sentient system — an amalgamation of basically all human knowledge and brilliance, working at scale?

Another camp leans more cautious: AI probably won't replace everything, but it could realistically replace something like 80–90% of jobs, following a Pareto-shaped curve. The remaining slice is where the real question lives.

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Seeking the Real

There's a second debate sitting right next to the first one: as AI content becomes ubiquitous, people start craving warmth again — real human content, real human-made products. We're already seeing glimpses of this, and part of it might just be a natural human resistance to change. But as AI keeps improving, AI-made and human-made will become harder and harder to tell apart, and we're seeing early signs of that too.

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The Universal Income Question

Then there's the question of how we'd actually earn a living in that world. Universal income gets floated a lot as the answer. On paper, it's a nice idea — money without having to do anything for it. But would you actually want to rely on something you have zero control over? The people at the top become the gatekeepers, and everyone else is left subject to whatever they decide. Back to slavery, baby. Maybe that's too dramatic a way to put it, but that version of the future is kind of dystopian when you sit with it.

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Building a Moat

So here's what I've landed on, for myself, as the things worth building toward.

Human-focused work. AI can't replace actual human relationships — that's basically the whole argument. Human services will stick around. I'll admit this is the hopeful, optimistic angle for me. Who doesn't want an R2-D2? Maybe even a C-3PO, if you don't find it annoying.

Technical depth, and physical work. The people who keep pushing past the edge of their own knowledge — genuinely upskilling, not just keeping up — are harder to replace. Even harder if the work involves delicate, hands-on physical tasks. The same logic extends to physical distribution, though, on second thought, self-driving cars already exist. So maybe it's only a matter of time before the physical work that can be commercialized gets automated too.

Data. Information that's unique to specific individuals or institutions is its own kind of moat. AI hallucinates, and a confident answer without real expertise behind it can sound just as true as a correct one. It can't replace actual, grounded data — it still needs access to it to be accurate in the first place.

Institutional security. Governments and large institutions can simply decide to keep certain professions around — because they're written into law, or required by some standard somewhere. Governments and regulation move slowly, especially around technology, and that slowness can work in your favor.

One thing I did with this in mind: I took a government job — and made sure it was an interesting one — so that if I ever transfer, it's into something equally interesting. There are plenty of options inside that system, even if there are gatekeepers to get through.

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Wherever AI ends up taking us, the question worth sitting with is simple: where will you stand when it gets there?

I hope you enjoyed today's blog.

P.S. There's also semi-passive income as a piece of this — but that's a topic for another time.