The AI Economy Needs Chutzpah, Not Compliance

Thanks to AI, the market now rewards a different personality trait from ages past: supreme self-confidence. Or gall.

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What if AI-driven job loss is due to an educational failure? Better yet, what if it could be corrected with a new way of instructing our youth?

To appreciate this bold proposal, let’s recall the origins of our educational system. Much of America’s modern school model traces back to 19th-century Prussia’s standardized ‘factory school’ approach. State-funded schools standardized what was taught, often aligning education with workforce need. As Allison Schrager writes for Quartz, “Factory owners required a docile, agreeable workers who would show up on time and do what their managers told them. Sitting in a classroom all day with a teacher was good training for that.”

Building on that idea, Northwestern University economist Joel Mokyr describes the importance of this educational model on the population’s psyche in a paper for the Carnegie-Rochester Conference Series on Public Policy, published by Elsevier. “Much of this education, however, was not technical in nature but social and moral. Workers who had always spent their working days in a domestic setting, had to be taught to follow orders, to respect the space and property rights of others, be punctual, docile, and sober.”

There is little doubt that this type of education opened economic doors previously unavailable. It especially helped agrarian workers transition into modern forms of employment, starting with factories and cascading into the office-based jobs that now serve as the backbone of the professional class. At the end of the 18^th century leading up to the Industrial Era, the USDA reports that of the 4 million Americans captured in the 1790 census, 9 out of 10 lived and worked on farms. By contrast, in 2023, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported approximately 70.3 million people now work in professional occupations, representing a significant amount of the full American workforce.

This shift demonstrates the old adage that the only constant we can expect in life is change. Due to sweeping technological advances by way of AI, isn’t it past time we revisit how we educate our young? If not, we risk jeopardizing their earning prospects.

This is the belief of Boris Berezovsky, Chief Financial Officer of SKB Cases, a manufacturer of premier protective cases serving aerospace and aviation, military, industrial and first responder markets, as well as music and pro audio, photo and video, sports, and mobile medical applications. As he told me in our interview, “For generations we trained students to be compliant and efficient inside systems. Now the system itself is learning, automating, and accelerating, and the market is rewarding a different trait entirely: chutzpah.”

Chutzpah is a Yiddish word meaning “supreme self-confidence, nerve, or gall.” Berezovsky knows the term well. As a former Israeli military officer, he has said that even conscripts start at the entry level; an experience that rewards nerve as much as discipline.

Berezovsky sees a similar dynamic in business: AI rewards people who improve systems, not those who merely follow them. “With so many companies automating the work that people once did, the future belongs to those who can successfully balance being compliant and yet still possessing Chutzpah to stand out in a crowd.”

The reality is more and more companies now have pre-defined items and tasks that can be automated. It makes little sense to assign rote work to a human when AI can do it more efficiently and with fewer mistakes. Instead, tomorrow’s companies need critical thinkers with chutzpah to make higher-level decisions. “This doesn’t mean all those entry level jobs have to go away,” Berezovsky adds. “We’re just shifting the work from order-taking to applying common sense, especially as human workers offer the kind of tailored judgment and contextual decision-making that AI cannot reliably offer.”

Seen in this light, Chutzpah isn’t meant to be some off-putting personality quirk. Rather, it’s an apt survival strategy for an economic climate where routine work gets handed to the machines, leaving the higher order cerebral activities to people possessing discernment and the gall to think independently.

From this perspective, the educational solution isn’t to push for more STEM programs, emphasizing coding, engineering, and math. Instead, it’s to lean into the “soft skills” of interpersonal communication, constructive dissent, and independent thinking that haven’t been as historically prized.

Dionne Mejer offers a practical framework that maps well to such an educational reimagination. An executive coach focused on revenue excellence, enablement, and leadership development with 25+ years of experience in the field, she offers a related framework for business leaders adopting AI technology: identify, specify, execute. “Schools can also use this mental map to prepare tomorrow’s students for a future that looks nothing like what came before it,” she told me via interview.

What follows is a way to reimagine education how Berezovsky suggests using Mejer’s three-part model for thinking and working outside the box.

Identify: We first need to determine what unique critical-thinking behaviors we actually want students to wield in the AI era. This can include questioning assumptions, challenging group think, seeking missing context, discerning bias, and reconciling tradeoffs.

Specify: We should also look at the issue from the employer side, zeroing in on the types of creative intellectual work that will be most valuable. From the educational standpoint, we would do well to develop the specific type of epistemological model that will better prepare graduates for the future of work. It’s also advisable to develop entrepreneurial teaching materials students can leverage to go into business for themselves.

Execute: The final step is to better design curriculum that will lead to measurable learning outcomes, bolstering potential in an unprecedented economy. For too long, we have taught to the test or inflated grades. Both hinder career outcomes upon graduation. Instead, we must grade tomorrow’s students in ways that cannot be gamed by cheating with AI. Crucially, we need to invent rubrics that gauge reasoning quality and problem-solving. This way we can better track whether students can actually defend their thinking, not just check off another box.

Ultimately, future work will depend less on repetitive activities like data entry and instead demand distinctively human qualities, including creativity and pragmatism. The Intelligence Age doesn’t require obedient workers. We already have AI for that. And soon, actual robots. Instead, we need constructively bold, young people with sufficient chutzpah to provide real value in the market. That future looks bright for team human.