Watch hiring managers explain their picks. Doctors describe diagnoses. Investors justify trades. Strip the narrative—it's all pattern matching. Just like AI.
We called it "intuition" when patterns were opaque. "Experience" when they took years to learn. "Judgment" when we couldn't articulate them. But it was always pattern matching. The difference? Humans bleed when patterns fail.
The Weight of Consequences
The executive's "gut feel" leads to bankruptcy—they're gone. The doctor's diagnosis kills someone—lawsuit, license, life ruined. The investor's pattern breaks—career over. AI's pattern fails? Version 2.0 ships Tuesday.
This is what we were really calling judgment: pattern matching with consequences. Not superior cognition. Not mystical intuition. Just someone who bleeds when wrong.
AI matches patterns better, faster, without mythology. But when its patterns break—and they always break—who pays? The vendor? The user? The patient who trusted the diagnosis? Accountability disperses into air.
Real judgment was never about thinking differently. It was about thinking while mortgaged to the outcome. The skin in the game transforms pattern matching into something we had to dress up as wisdom.
We're not replacing human judgment with AI. We're replacing people who pay for being wrong with systems that don't. The patterns are the same. The stakes vanished.