There's lots of talk about moats right now.
"Audience is the moat." "Attention is the moat." "Agility is the moat."
Etc.
Most of these are oriented towards business moats. Meaning: which businesses will survive and which will go under.
I'm more interested in the human moat. The answer to the question:
What will determine who thrives and who declines—both professionally and personally—in a world full of AI?
I've been groping at this answer since early 2023, and I've come up with some decent frames / models for thinking about it. Link to we must become creators post, other posts I've talked about creativity and AI , look in the content mcp for other stuff I've said about it, and link it here.
I think those were (and still are) pretty good frames, but I have been searching for something cleaner. Simpler. I'm looking for root-cause. I'm looking for what makes a manager at a company say,
"No, not Sarah. We're keeping her no matter what. Her and Raj. They're like the two we don't ever part with. Pay them more if you have to, and everyone else we can replace with AI if that makes sense. But not them."
What is it that Raj and Sarah have? What's the magic?
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