26 Principles for 2026: #23 Algorithmic Partnership

You need to get beyond the hype and hysteria. The competition isn’t between you and the AI. The competition is between “You + AI” and “You Alone.”

“Don’t ‘learn’ AI. Redesign your personal productivity around it.” - Futurist Jim Carroll

Futurist Jim Carroll is writing his end-of-2025 / introduction-to-2026 series, 26 Principles for 2026. You can follow along at 2026.jimcarroll.com. He welcomes your comments.

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Like it or not, you will have to learn to live with “The Machine.“

We are on Day 24. You have the radar (Day 21), the open road (Day 22), and many principles I’ve shared before that. Now, we must address the elephant in the room: The Machine.

For the last three years, the narrative has been “Man vs. Machine.” People are going to lose their jobs! We will all be working 2 hours a day, 3 days a week, because AI will do all the work. Stuff like that.

In 2026, that line of thinking is obsolete. You need to get beyond the hype and hysteria. The competition isn’t between you and the AI. The competition is between “You + AI” and “You Alone.”

The Linear Leader tries to outwork the algorithm. The Exponential Leader learns to partner with it.

Don’t fear having to compete with AI. Learn to conduct it. The discipline you must master is Algorithmic Partnership.

Here’s your chalkboard summary - generated, of course, by AI!

The Great Reframing: From Displacement to Orchestration

To master this partnership, you first have to understand the emotional and economic rollercoaster we have just ridden. The narrative of “AI as a job killer” didn’t just appear; it evolved, crashed, and reformed into something far more interesting.

And the voyage has caused a lot of grief!

The Era of Fear (2023–2024)

When ChatGPT and its peers first arrived, the world suffered from what we might call “Displacement Anxiety.” The logic was linear and terrifying: If an AI can write a report in 10 seconds that takes me 10 hours, I am obsolete.

That fear wasn’t abstract. Major forecasts poured gasoline on it. The World Economic Forum’s 2020 estimates talked about 85 million jobs potentially displaced by 2025, alongside 97 million new roles emerging. That headline shaped how people felt, even though it was always a projection, not a verdict.

Then there were grand pronouncements by all kinds of tech CEOs and other leaders about the magic productivity benefits of AI, with one suggesting that they wouldn’t have to hire any new people in the future since AI would do all the work! Folks nodded their heads in some sort of weird agreement, buying into the narrative. People were getting drunk on Kool-Aid!

It’s going to end wars. Right. Got it. I rest my case.

I’ve been here before. In the 1940s, Popular Mechanics magazine was predicting that the machine era would see us with unlimited leisure time!

Today. Oh, well, apparently we are going to have 3-day work weeks!

Sigh.

One impact of this hype, though, as CEOs not only drank the Kool-Aid but also injected it straight into their veins. They got high on the hype and made ‘bold decisions.’ We saw a wave of tech layoffs often attributed to “AI efficiency,” fuelling this zero-sum narrative. The reality? More likely that companies were using AI as an excuse to do the cost-cutting that they had planned in the face of spending uncertainty.

But with all of this, the fear became implanted in our minds - AI was a 1:1 substitute for human intellect, and because of that, we were all going to lose our jobs. We were doomed!

Sigh. You need to understand what’s really going on.