There are two worrying changes coming for humans, and they are more connected than they appear.
The first is the rise of social media. The second is AI reshaping which jobs survive and what our role looks like when a large portion of the current workforce’s tasks have been automated.
On the surface these seem unrelated. But Iain McGilchrist’s work in The Master and His Emissary, which explores how the two hemispheres of the brain function differently, gives you the framework to see why they are actually the same problem.
The Left Brain
The left brain deals in facts and detail. Take something as basic as hunger. The left brain holds tens of thousands of discrete pieces of information. How to open a tin of beans. How to catch a fish. How to chew, how to buy noodles, how to read a use-by date. It stores, retrieves, and applies specific knowledge in response to specific prompts.
That is also, almost precisely, how a large language model works.
Which means the category of work that the left brain handles, the recall and application of stored information, is exactly the category that AI will continue to absorb. If your professional value is primarily the ability to retrieve and apply knowledge that can be documented, that value is under structural pressure and it is not coming back.
The Right Brain
The right brain does something different. It filters. It decides what is relevant, focuses attention on what matters, and ignores the noise. Think of it as an ad-blocker for your cognition. It is not processing more information. It is deciding which information is worth processing at all.
This is genuinely difficult for AI. Not impossible, but difficult in ways that matter commercially. Filtering requires judgement about what is meaningful to a specific human in a specific context, and that judgement is grounded in something AI does not have, which is genuine stakes, genuine experience, and genuine understanding of why something matters.
The Problem We Are Not Talking About
Social media is making us left-brain dominant.
We are drowning in information and engineered dopamine responses. Scrolling, reacting, absorbing, sharing, reacting again. The volume is so relentless that people are no longer processing what they consume in any meaningful way. They are just moving through it. Information has become so overburdening that large numbers of people are now actively resisting it.
And in the middle of this, the skill that is being quietly atrophied is the right brain capacity. The ability to filter, to prioritise, to sit with something long enough to find the meaning in it, to see patterns across noise, to exercise genuine judgement rather than immediate reaction.
We are training ourselves out of exactly the capability that AI cannot replicate, at precisely the moment when that capability is becoming more commercially valuable than it has ever been.
How to Future-Proof Your Career
Two things. Neither of them is complicated, but both of them require deliberate effort.
Learn to use AI. This is the baseline. The people who treat AI as a threat rather than a tool are going to be outcompeted by the people who treat it as leverage. That is not a prediction. It is already happening.
Learn how to be more human. This is the harder one, and it is the one that matters more over the longer term.
Being more human means stopping the collection of knowledge for its own sake and starting to build judgement. It means shifting from seeking answers to learning to ask better questions. It means deliberately blocking out noise, clutter, and useless opinion so that you can see patterns and meaning that the noise is obscuring. It means developing the specifically human capacities that AI processes around rather than through. Creating, empathising, storytelling, leading.
AI can process at a scale no human can match. What it cannot do is prioritise what matters to people. It cannot choose what is worth building, or why. It cannot feel the weight of a decision or understand what is at stake in a relationship. It cannot exercise the kind of contextual, values-driven judgement that determines whether an action is actually the right one.
That is the gap. That is where the work is. And that is the clue to where durable career and commercial value is going to sit for the next twenty years.
What This Means in Sales
Sales is one of the fields where this distinction is most immediate and most visible.
The left-brain functions in sales, scripts, objection lists, qualification frameworks, CRM data entry, follow-up sequencing, most of these are already being handled or augmented by technology. The volume activities that were once the primary measure of a salesperson’s effort are becoming automated or assisted at a pace that is accelerating.
What cannot be automated is the right-brain sales capability. Reading a room. Sensing that the stated objection is not the real one. Knowing when to push and when to let silence work. Building genuine trust rather than performing it. Understanding what a buyer actually needs, not just what they said they need.
The salespeople and sales leaders who will be most valuable over the next decade are the ones who invest in developing that capacity deliberately, who use AI to handle the volume and the process so they can put their full attention on the judgement calls that actually determine whether a deal moves forward.
