AI is just a calculator for Gen Alpha

We are living through the third great revolution in modern business.

The first revolution automated administration through mainframes and databases. The second digitised services through smartphones, apps, APIs and cloud. The third revolution is now intelligence: machines that can write, analyse, reason, create and increasingly act on our behalf.

That is why so many people are scared.

Personally, I’ve been thinking about AI, ChatGPT, Gemini and all of these new systems and, in fairness, it is easy to see why people are worried.

Every major company is now openly replacing human roles with technology.

Block cut 4,000 jobs, roughly 40% of its workforce. Jack Dorsey openly stated: “I think most companies will follow. Within the next year, the majority will reach the same conclusion.” Investors loved it. The stock jumped more than 20%.

Coinbase cut 14% of staff in 2026 in order to become “AI-native”.

Crypto.com reduced headcount whilst warning that firms failing to integrate AI would simply “be left behind”.

Meanwhile, on Wall Street, banks eliminated tens of thousands of roles whilst simultaneously producing record profits. Even traditionally cautious CEOs stopped softening the message. Jamie Dimon bluntly told employees and investors: “Stop sticking your head in the sand.”

Across global technology firms, more than ninety thousand jobs have already disappeared this year alone.

So yes, there is clearly disruption happening.

For the first time in decades, the fear is not that technology will simply change jobs. The fear is that technology may replace the very things we thought made humans economically valuable: thinking, writing, analysing, coding, designing and communicating.

But then something interesting happened this week.

Sam Altman appears virtually at a conference organised by Commonwealth Bank and admitted that even OpenAI had probably overestimated the short-term social and economic damage AI would cause. In particular, he noted that entry-level white-collar jobs had not collapsed nearly as fast as many had predicted.

That is important.

Because there is a huge difference between technology capability and human adoption.

We have seen this before.

The internet existed before businesses knew how to use it properly. Smartphones existed before companies redesigned customer journeys around them. Cloud existed before banks trusted it. Technology always arrives faster than organisations, regulation, culture and human behaviour adapt, and this is where AI will focus. AI is not about human replacement. It is about human augmentation.

It is fantastic at enriching conversations, improving text, generating ideas, creating imagery and experimenting with video. It gives you intellectual leverage. It expands the surface area of your thinking. It can help you articulate ideas you already have but struggle to express clearly.

A good example is writing my books and blogs.

Much of the time, I have the core thought already formed in my head. I know the direction. I know the argument. I know the emotional tone. What I sometimes struggle with is articulation: how to structure the flow, sharpen the wording or frame the narrative. So, I ask ChatGPT.

The reply is often impressive. Sometimes surprisingly good. But it is never the final product.

I still need to interpret the answer. I still need to reshape it into my language, my style and my worldview. I still need to decide whether the logic makes sense, whether the tone works and whether the conclusion reflects what I actually believe.

In other words, I come up with the question; AI helps generate possible answers; and I interpret and refine the result into something meaningful.

That is not replacement … it is collaboration.

When you look at it this way, AI for communication is remarkably similar to calculators for mathematics.

Growing up, many of us were taught maths using abacus, slide rulers and logarithmic tables. Teachers forced students to perform long calculations manually. Then the electronic calculator arrived and changed everything almost overnight.

Traditionalists hated it.

They argued children would stop understanding mathematics. They worried students would become intellectually lazy. They complained that machines were “doing the thinking”.

Sound familiar?

But here is the reality: we no longer expect humans to behave like mathematic engines because machines are vastly better at repetitive arithmetic than we are. That does not mean humans stopped needing mathematics. We still need to understand the problem. We still need to frame the equation correctly. We still need to know whether the result makes sense. We still need judgement. The machine simply removed the mechanical labour.

AI is doing exactly the same thing for language, communication and creativity.

It does not remove the need for thinking. It changes where human value sits.

The real value is no longer in mechanically producing words, just as human value is no longer in manually calculating square roots. The value shifts upwards into judgement, originality, interpretation, emotional intelligence, ethics, curiosity and asking the right questions.

This is why I increasingly think the people who will struggle most in the AI era are not those who use AI too much, but those who refuse to use it at all because the future workplace will not replace humans with AI. It will replace humans who refuse AI with humans who know how to use it well.

That is a very different conversation.

 

POSTSCRIPT

For those of younger age abacus, logarithmic tables and slide rulers were given to every child in math class to support calculating.

The abacus is the oldest of the three, dating back thousands of years to ancient civilisations in places like China, Mesopotamia and Greece. At first glance it looks simple: a frame with rods and beads. Yet it was remarkably powerful. Skilled merchants could perform addition, subtraction, multiplication and division faster than many people can today with a calculator. The abacus was not just a counting device. It was a way of visualising numbers physically, turning arithmetic into movement and memory. In many parts of Asia, expert abacus operators could calculate with astonishing speed well into the computer age.

Logarithmic tables arrived in the early seventeenth century after John Napier introduced logarithms. His discovery transformed mathematics because it converted multiplication into addition and division into subtraction. Instead of multiplying enormous numbers manually, users looked up values in giant printed books of logarithms. Astronomers, bankers, navigators and military engineers relied on these tables for centuries. They dramatically reduced calculation time in an era when even basic arithmetic could consume hours.

The slide rule took logarithms out of books and put them into a handheld instrument. Closely associated with William Oughtred, the slide rule used logarithmic scales engraved onto sliding rulers. By aligning scales, users could multiply, divide, calculate roots and solve trigonometric problems mechanically. It became the symbol of engineers, scientists and pilots throughout the twentieth century. The engineers behind early aircraft, bridges, nuclear programmes and even the Apollo missions at NASA all used slide rules before electronic calculators existed.

What is fascinating is that these tools represent three different ways of thinking about numbers. The abacus was physical arithmetic. Logarithmic tables were mathematical abstraction written into books. The slide rule was analogue computation and, effectively, a portable mechanical computer.

Then came electronic calculators in the 1970s and personal computers in the 1980s. Almost overnight, tools that had shaped commerce, engineering and science for centuries vanished from everyday use. Yet they mattered enormously because they trained people to understand estimation, approximation and the structure of mathematics itself, rather than simply pressing buttons and trusting the machine.

This was written by ChatGPT in response to the question: describe abacus, logarithmic tables and slide rulers.