ESSAY
Where Will Judgement Live?
AI can improve performance while quietly reducing the human practice that future judgement depends on.
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September 9, 2026
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13
min read
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Notes on Human Agency (Substack)
What disappears when the task disappears?
A task can be more than a unit of work.
It may be where someone learns to notice an anomaly, question an easy answer, recognise when context matters or recover when something goes wrong.
Once AI takes more of that work, the output may improve while the practice underneath it fades.
Remove the task and part of the apprenticeship can disappear with it.
The capability you stop practising may be the capability you later discover you still need.
Better performance can conceal a longer-term risk
An organisation may gain speed, consistency and efficiency while becoming more dependent on a system for judgement that once sat partly in people.
That matters when the model is wrong, unavailable, contested or confronted with a case it doesn’t understand.
The important question shifts from:
Does the AI perform?
to:
What are people no longer learning to do?
Bring that question into implementation
Before shifting more work to AI, ask what human practice the task currently sustains.
Where will that practice move once the system takes over more of the work?
Can people still intervene when the technology is absent or wrong?
Who owns the consequence if the capability has thinned by the time it is needed?
Governance also has to look at what remains human
AI governance has become better at examining system performance, safety and control.
Less attention has gone to what implementation changes in the people who remain inside the work.
That gap matters.
The issue isn’t whether humans must keep doing everything they do now.
It is whether organisations know which capabilities still need to remain embodied in people, and why.
What must people remain able to do after the system becomes good at doing more for them?
Where will judgement live?
Organisations need to know what remains human, what is becoming dependent on technology, and what may no longer be there when circumstances change.
Somebody will have to exercise judgement then, with whatever has been left to form it.
WHERE THIS SITS
The Brain Commons
This essay belongs to The Brain Commons — a lens on the shared conditions that sustain or deplete human agency.
Continue the sequence
What Are We Building Towards When We Build Brain Capital
Individual capacities are real. But they are not privately produced, and they cannot be protected by asking individuals alone to adapt. The central claim of the work, made at human scale.
Where Will Judgement Live?
On AI and persuasion — and on flattery, the most intimate and least visible form of cognitive capture: a machine returning a sharpened image of your own thinking, faster than you could make it yourself.
The Brain Commons
Human agency, shared stewardship, and the ecologies that shape us
What if the struggle we see in a person is also telling us something about the world around them?
The Brain Commons puts the person and their surroundings back in the same picture.
It asks how relationships, work, technology, care and institutions shape what someone can actually do, and what responsibility follows once those influences become visible.
What Are We Building Towards When We Build Brain Capital
An offering to the brain-capital movement on agency and the conditions through which capacity becomes action
A person can have capability and still lack the room to use it.
This essay asks what sits between what people hold and what their circumstances let them do with it.
The conversation around this essay continues on
Bring the work into the room.
Some of this work belongs in rooms where decisions are made: universities, health systems, public institutions, leadership teams, conferences, committees and organisations holding a hard question.
David is available for keynotes, panels, lectures, webinars, facilitated enquiries, advisory conversations and collaborative work where questions of human capability, brain health, AI, judgement, care and institutional conditions are in play.
Human capability, agency, attention, care and the conditions that shape us.
Brisbane, Australia
This work is written on the lands of the Turrbal and Yagara peoples. I acknowledge their custodianship of Country and their elders past and present, and the truth that the conditions I write about — attention, care, participation, stewardship — have been practised on these lands for tens of thousands of years.
