TL;DR
Watching my toddler insist on doing things himself is a painful but necessary lesson in letting go of control, even when I know I could do it better and faster.
I'm realizing we're starting to treat AI the same way. Studies show AI is already outperforming us in tasks like coding, but our gut instinct is still to micromanage it and not fully trust it.
The uncomfortable truth is that the list of tasks where AI is better than us is going to grow exponentially, forcing us to confront our need for control.
The question isn't if we let go, but how. We should learn to cede control in routine, measurable domains while keeping strict human oversight on high-stakes, ethical decisions.
Why does this matter? Because clinging to the old way of doing things out of fear or ego will make us slower and less competitive. We need to evolve from doers into architects.
My toddler is deep in his "I do it myself" phase. Every meal is a tiny, brutal battle of wills. He grabs the spoon, his little fist clenched with absolute certainty, and proceeds to get about 10% of the yogurt into his mouth and 90% onto his face and the chair. Every instinct in my body screams, "Just let me do it! It would be faster, cleaner, and better." But I have to bite my tongue and let him smear the yogurt everywhere. Because if I don't, he'll never learn. It’s infuriating, and it’s necessary. And it hit me the other day that this conflict between control and trust is how we are all starting to act with AI.
I was looking at a study recently about AI coding assistants. They did a blind test where developers had to rate different solutions to problems. Some were written by people, some by an AI. And the results were not even close. The AI's code was consistently ranked as better, cleaner, and more efficient. A clear win for the machines.
But then they interviewed the developers. And almost to a person, they said you still need a "human touch." That you can't really trust the AI, that it can be unpredictable or just plain wrong. It’s like they saw the proof with their own eyes, but their brain refused to accept the conclusion.
Let's just be honest with ourselves for a second. AI is now better than most humans at a growing number of tasks. Right now, it's things like writing boilerplate code. Soon it will be things like analyzing market data or drafting legal documents. Does it sound ridiculous to say that one day it will be better than us at most things? Maybe. But given the speed at which this stuff is moving, it sounds a lot less ridiculous than it did even a year ago.
This gap between what AI can do and what we let it do is where the real problem lies. It's a kind of cognitive dissonance, and it reveals a hard truth we don't want to face: the biggest challenge of AI isn't building it, it's learning to let it go.
This runs deeper than just about being afraid of AI making mistakes. Here’s my thinking: For all of human history, our intelligence has been our superpower. It's the one thing that set us apart. We could reason, create, and build our way out of any problem. Our entire sense of self-worth is tied up in being the smartest things on the planet. And now, we've built a machine that is starting to challenge that. Ceding a cognitive task to an AI feels like admitting we're becoming obsolete and so the mental block is harder.
So what's the answer? Of course we can't just blindly trust everything an AI spits out. I've written before about the need for "calibrated dependence" on these systems. But I think we also need to develop a sense of "calibrated trust."
You don’t give a toddler the car keys. There are areas where human oversight must be absolute, like critical medical diagnoses, courtroom sentencing, launching missiles. In these high-stakes, ethically-loaded domains, the AI is still very much in its toddler years, and our job is to be the responsible parent.
But in so many other areas, the AI is already ready. It knows how to drive. Asking a human to review every single line of AI-generated boilerplate code is like following your 20-year-old to the grocery store to make sure they pick the right brand of milk. It’s not just inefficient; it’s a failure to recognize demonstrated competence.
Our role has to change. We need to stop being micromanaging doers and start being strategic architects. Our job is to give the AI the destination, to program the ethical GPS, and to handle the truly weird, unexpected roadblocks. It's not to sit in the passenger seat and backseat drive the entire way.
Why does this even matter? Because in the short term, if your competitors are using these tools to their full potential and you’re not because of some vague, gut-level distrust, you’re going to get left behind. You will be slower, less efficient, and less innovative.
I know I’m not the first person to think about this, but framing it through my daily yogurt battles with my son made it click for me. The goal of being a good parent isn't to create a kid who depends on you forever.
Maybe the ultimate test of our intelligence won’t be whether we can build a superhuman AI. It will be whether we have the wisdom, and the courage, to trust it.
Final thought: Could I be completely off the mark here? It's possible. Is this future closer than we think? I'm willing to bet on it. Either way, these are the questions we need to start asking ourselves right now.