Now we know that AI won't take all of our jobs, Silicon Valley has to fix its fundamental mistake: Automation theater has to end

Silicon Valley is optimizing for the wrong metric. Most people working in high-stakes domains recognize now that AI will not take every job, but with that realization comes a harder truth: the industry has been building autonomy when it should have been building accountability.

The push for fully autonomous systems, agents that plan, reason, and act without human oversight, has created an automation theater where demos impress, but production systems disappoint. The obsession with autonomy at all costs is not only shortsighted; it is incompatible with how professionals actually work. In law, finance, tax, and other high stakes domains, wrong answers do not just waste time. They carry out real consequences.

The real moat in AI isn’t raw capability. It is trust. Systems that know whe