In 1963 Leon C. Megginson, a business professor at Louisiana State University said “It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change”. That has never been more true than today. The modern workforce is facing a global sorting function like we’ve never seen before. I fear a very large number of people are going to wake up and find themselves at the bottom of that stack ranking, having never seen it coming.

A sorting function is something you do every day. You sort the laundry by color and garment type. You hang your tools on the wall from largest to smallest. You sort the columns in a spreadsheet in alphabetical order. The workplace over the next several years is going to do its own sorting – from the most value add employees to the least. This is not new. Companies do it all the time. Low performers are put on PIP programs. Layoffs happen and poor performing employees or groups are culled. What’s different this time is that the definition of a low performer has changed.

Previously, even if you weren’t the smartest or best employee, if you worked long hours, understood your role, showed up on time, did what the company asked – it was enough. You were a “good” employee. AI has changed that definition overnight. The power of these new tools is mind boggling. The new definition of a good employee is how much value-add you can give to the company, and is it enough to justify putting you in the new roles that are coming?

Can you upgrade your own capabilities faster than the AI models are improving?

If yes → you get sorted upward into higher-value roles, new opportunities, or even entirely new career categories that didn’t exist five years ago. If no → you get sorted out (or at least pushed downward into roles that are either heavily automated, commoditized, or low-paid).

It’s not a moral judgment; it’s just the mechanical outcome of the comparison rule. Just like a library sorting books by Dewey Decimal doesn’t “hate” the books that end up in the 900s, the economy isn’t punishing people—it’s simply applying the new precedence rule: AI fluency + irreplaceable human judgment/creativity/empathy beats “human doing repetitive or predictable work” every single time.

This feels different from past tech shifts because previous revolutions (computers, internet, smartphones) were additive and slower. You had years to adapt. AI is multiplicative and accelerating. It’s not replacing one tool; it’s becoming the operating system for cognition itself. The half-life of “un-augmented” skills is shrinking fast. The gap between adapters and non-adapters is widening in real time. We’re already seeing it: people who treat AI as a daily co-pilot (research, coding, writing, analysis, strategy) are already 5–10× more productive and opening doors that simply won’t exist for non-users.

How do you know if you’re going to get sorted out? If you treat AI as a fad or a threat. If you keep doing your job the exact same way. If you think AI is just a fancy google search. If you honestly tell yourself there’s no way AI can do my job. If you’re waiting for someone else (company, government, school) to “reskill” or train you. The scary reality for so many corporate workers today is that nobody is coming to rescue you. You are going to have to adapt or die. Self-rescue is your only option.

“Oh, that will never happen because the eight of us in our group are the only ones who know how to run the TPS reports. Some magical AI tool isn’t going to figure out everything we do overnight.”

Do you really believe that? Yes, a 15-year veteran knows the quirks of your CRM, your clients, and your weird compliance rules. But once you give an AI-native adaptor access to your internal data + good prompting + retrieval tools, they close that gap shockingly fast. The marginal value of “tribal knowledge” is dropping because AI + documentation + search makes it commoditized. Training an average performer who’s skeptical or slow to adapt is expensive (time, money, opportunity cost) and has low yield. A new hire who already lives in Cursor, Claude, and agent workflows can be productive in weeks, not quarters. Headcount budgets are fixed or shrinking; the math favors swapping 3–5 “legacy” roles for 1–2 high-output AI-fluent ones.

Public companies, private equity-backed firms, and anyone chasing valuation multiples get rewarded for margin expansion. “We reduced headcount 18% while increasing output 40% via AI” is a story investors love. “We spent $8M training everyone and productivity is flat” is not. There’s now a clear premium for people who treat AI as an operating system, not a tool. Companies are discovering they can pay that premium to a smaller number of people and still come out ahead. Keep a couple of curious domain experts as “translators” and flood the rest of the org with AI adaptors is the strategy every successful company is starting to realize.

The name of the game now for employees and companies is value-add and productivity. You better believe your competition and your coworkers are going to be 10-15-20× more productive in the next six months. Will you be?

This is your one and only warning call. AI is coming for your job in the next 18-24 months. (Yes, that fast) New grads with zero AI experience are the first to be sorted out – they have nothing to offer. Next are the lower to mid level white collar workers whose entire job is working with a computer. If you write reports, documents, emails, schedule meetings, write copy, crunch numbers, analyize data… your days are limited.

It’s time to level up your game. Assume right now you’re going to get axed in the next six months. Start preparing today – you better be spending every moment of your evenings reading, learning, exploring, practicing, and gaining AI skills that are going to give you a fighting chance at landing a new job. The global sorting function that’s coming will not be kind.

Companies are not charities or universities. Their sorting function is profit, speed, and competitive edge—not “equitable upskilling for all.” (sorry Bernie Sanders) The politically correct narrative (“we’re investing in our people!”) is mostly signaling for talent attraction, regulators, and PR. In practice, most leadership teams are running the cold hard math.

The encouraging flip side: unlike rigid algorithms that sort once and forget, this one is continuous. You can keep re-entering the input queue every day by learning one new thing—better prompting, building agents, understanding model limitations, combining AI with whatever your unique domain knowledge is. The people who do that are the ones who will keep getting resorted upward.

It’s an incredibly exciting time. Yes, scary – but the tools, products, and innovation we’re going to see coming out of the other side will be mind-blowing. So as Clint Eastwood playing Dirty Harry famously said:

“You’ve got to ask yourself one question – am I on the right side of the sorting order? Well, are ya, punk?”