Minerva Immersion Week Day 5: What People Must Still Decide

Originally written in Traditional Chinese: Minerva Immersion Week 第 5 天：AI 越來越快的時候，什麼事還得由人決定？

Minerva Immersion Week, Day 5 (Oct 22): when AI gets faster at everything, what must people still decide?

Context: Minerva's MDA is an online master's for working professionals. Immersion Weeks bring us to one city for a week. I have finished my MDA; Tokyo is my third and last.

Morning: Recruit, one of Japan's largest HR groups and the parent of Indeed. Junya told us about an employee at the travel magazine Jalan who turned it into online booking and changed how it made money. "And now he is the CEO of our company." People who leave Recruit aren't "turnover": "We call it as graduation." Many become founders. "We keep surviving because we are disrupting even us."

I brought one question and asked everyone I met: what is the most important ability in the AI era?

A Recruit leader: knowledge mattered less after the internet; how you think will matter less after AI. What remains is execution: see real pain points, use AI to build a test, take it into the real world. "Ideation itself it's meaningless."

A product manager: deciding which problems to solve. Would he use AI for that? "I don't think so." He relies on genba, the actual site. "We have to define what to solve. It's like human's work." Customers still want car inspections done by a certified person. I told him: AI cannot be responsible; the person who signs can.

HR: adaptability. Employees can apply every year to move to another department; their manager learns only once the match succeeds.

A PM who used to be an engineer: "I don't use AI for my words or messages."

An engineering manager: their AI tool did about 30 months of one person's work in four months. "This is work our team gained, not work we cut."

AI is getting better at how. Which problem, for whom, and who is accountable is still ours.

Afternoon: Ashinaga, a foundation that since 1969 has helped more than 110,000 children who lost a parent go on to high school and university. Pius, from Uganda, showed a photo of himself at 11. Ashinaga got him to university in Japan; now he works there helping students like him. Students run street fundraising for the next generation. They call it onokuri, passing on the good you received, and kokorozashi, "your ambition that doesn't stay within yourself."

The most honest moment: scholarships delivered are an output. "Maybe ten years later, twenty years later, where are these people?" He named the risk of survivorship bias. It was the question I had prepared; he raised it first.

One company calls leaving "graduation." One foundation turns help received into help passed on. Both treat choosing the problem as a human job.

MDA if you want a degree that changes how you think without leaving your job; World Wise if you lead a team.

Minerva Immersion Week Day 5: What People Must Still Decide

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