Why this former CEO & author feels people shouldn't allow AI to make them 'feel ordinary'

TEXT START: Former HCL Technologies CEO Vineet Nayar, whose new book Humans First, Machines Second insists the real AI threat is not machines replacing humans, but humans losing faith in what makes them unique, explains what the future of workforce optimisation should look like.

The Dissection

This is a book-promotional argument that converts an employment-system crisis into a mindset problem. It admits AI will eliminate tasks and jobs, then shifts attention to human creativity, courage, and the danger of feeling “ordinary.” Its preferred story is that enlightened companies will reinvest AI-created capacity into innovation instead of layoffs.

What it does not examine is ownership, competitive pressure, bargaining power, demand, or how displaced workers retain income. It treats the use of freed labor as a managerial choice rather than a structural contest.

The Core Fallacy

The text confuses what firms could choose with what competitive pressure makes them choose.

If AI performs 50–70% of a job faster and cheaper, the savings are not a neutral pool waiting to become more human work. A rival that achieves the same output with fewer employees pressures every other firm to reduce headcount. Retaining redundant labor only makes sense if the “exploded” human contribution generates more value than the savings from elimination. The article provides no mechanism guaranteeing that outcome.

It also assumes that judgment, curiosity, empathy, and imagination remain scarce, necessary, and economically remunerated. They may remain meaningful. That does not mean they preserve wages. A worker can stop competing with AI at being AI and still become economically unnecessary.

The 2008 example is not proof against this. Workers were still indispensable inputs during that crisis. AI attacks the necessity of cognitive labor itself. Solidarity can improve performance where labor remains required; it cannot repeal substitution.

Hidden Assumptions

• Firms can resist cost competition and voluntarily retain workers.
• Freed capacity automatically creates new demand, revenue, and useful work.
• The remaining human 30% cannot also be automated, standardized, or reduced.
• Employees will receive authority and income from AI gains rather than being discarded.
• Trust and culture can substitute for ownership and control.
• Feeling inferior is the central danger, rather than loss of income and productive participation.
• Human originality will remain scarce enough to support mass employment.

Social Function

Classification: partial truth, transition management, and ideological anesthetic, with an element of elite self-exoneration.

The article is correct that companies often waste human capacity and that AI could be used for more than headcount reduction. But it uses that limited truth to make structural displacement sound like a failure of imagination or leadership. Responsibility is shifted from ownership and competitive mechanics onto corporate culture and workers’ psychology.

It reassures professionals that they can remain valuable by being more creative, while offering no survival mechanism for people whom AI makes unnecessary. The “feel ordinary” framing is status therapy applied to a productive-participation collapse.

The Verdict

Nayar does not refute the Discontinuity Thesis. He describes a humane management preference inside a system rewarded for substituting labor.

“Explode the 30%” may work for a minority of Sovereigns and Servitors who control capital, customers, distribution, or genuinely indispensable judgment. For the mass workforce, it is an aspiration, not an economic mechanism. If cognitive automation, coordination failure, and productive-participation collapse proceed as specified, morale will not restore the wage–consumption circuit.

This is a polished anesthetic: it acknowledges the corpse is cooling, then argues that better leadership could make it feel alive.