In a March 2026 Substack essay, former Meta engineer Michael Novati argues that AI is surfacing an uncomfortable truth about modern meritocracy: much of what the professional world called "talent" was never intrinsic human capability, but rather an economic premium placed on cognitive skills that were temporarily scarce. As AI commoditizes pattern recognition, technical fluency, and analytical labor — precisely the skills that commanded the highest salaries for the past two centuries — that scarcity premium collapses, and the framework that tied human identity to market value begins to unravel.
Novati draws on his own trajectory from Canadian valedictorian to Facebook insider to frame the argument. He describes how early in his career he learned to read the unwritten "constitutional" values beneath an organization's surface rules — a skill that gave him access to senior leadership and eventually to billionaires, celebrities, and tech executives. The most striking portraits in the essay are cautionary: Google-minted engineers made wealthy too early, <a href="/news/2026-03-13-what-do-coders-do-after-ai-anil-dash-identity-crisis-software-developers">left directionless without the validation of scarce labor</a>; and a famous movie star so shaped by external reflection that living and performing became indistinguishable. Contrasted against these is WhatsApp cofounder Jan Koum, who after a billion-dollar exit drove a minivan to pick up his kids — someone who had, in Novati's framing, decoupled identity from market value before the reckoning arrived.
The essay's practical argument is a call to introspection aimed squarely at knowledge workers. Novati contends that empathy, taste, judgment rooted in lived experience, and interpersonal care are the durable residuals once AI strips away the scarcity premium on cognitive labor. He is careful not to romanticize the question — acknowledging that the night-shift worker worried about whether the car will start in the morning is not positioned to philosophize about meaning — but frames both the economically precarious and the wealthy-but-adrift as symptoms of the same broken aspirational system. His prescription is not to chase passion, but to begin, even incrementally, exploring what makes one distinctly human before economic disruption forces the question under worse conditions.
Novati is not the only voice making this case — writers like Paul Millerd and researchers at the Oxford Internet Institute have spent years arguing that the cognitive labor market was always more fragile than it appeared — but he is one of the few making it from inside the machine that built the disruption. The psychological displacement he describes is not a side effect of AI automation. For millions of <a href="/news/2026-03-14-nyt-ai-coding-assistants-end-of-programming-jobs">knowledge workers whose professional identity was built on doing things AI now does faster and cheaper</a>, it is the whole point. The full essay is available on Novati's Substack.