AI can't shit for me

Chamath Palihapitiya has a line that AI is middle execution. Strategy sits at the top, the customer sits at the bottom and AI eats the layers in between: the analysts, the coordinators, the people who turn a decision into a ticket and a ticket into a deliverable. It is a fair description of what is happening to companies. It stops one level too early.

Take it past the org chart to the primate. AI cannot eat for me. It cannot sleep for me. It cannot shit for me. I am not making a point about the current state of the models. Those three are fixed points, and they will still be fixed points when the models have taste, judgment and whatever we end up calling superintelligence. Every economic chain I am part of starts in my body and ends in my body. Between those two points is the middle. That is where AI lives, and it can get as smart as it likes in there.

The bookends

The first bookend is appetite. Hunger, boredom, fear, wanting to be seen, wanting to not die. Nothing in the chain starts without it, and it is the one input the middle cannot supply for itself. A model does not get hungry at 11am.

The second bookend is the last mile, and it is further in than people think. The delivery to the door is still middle. The plate on the table is still middle. The last mile is inside the skin: calories metabolised, a drug crossing the blood-brain barrier, eight hours of sleep actually slept, the dopamine when someone you respect says yes. Until something crosses that boundary, nothing has been consumed and no value has been delivered. It has only been moved closer.

Then there is the second bracket, which I think is the one most people skip: people. A primate wants most things from other primates. Status, sex, being picked, being listened to, being forgiven. The transaction that ends in my body very often started in someone else's regard for me, and the thing that crossed my skin was another person's attention. So the economy is bracketed twice. By bodies, and by other people. The want is mine. The having is mine. Everything else is a vendor.

What that does to the middle

Here is the uncomfortable part. The middle is most of the economy. From the farm to my mouth is forty layers of middle, and every one of them has a margin, a headcount and a line in GDP. Calling AI "only middle execution" sounds like a consolation. It isn't one. It describes AI eating nearly everything we currently measure and leaving humans the two ends.

This is the sequel to the argument I made about tokens. Tokens are the kilowatt-hour. The decision is the unit. The outcome is what you were paying for. This post closes the loop: an outcome is only an outcome when it terminates in a primate state. Fed, rested, safe, admired. A chain of decisions that never reaches a body was heat.

Where the moat goes

If the middle becomes fungible, the defensible positions are at the ends. You can own the appetite: the relationship with the wanting primate, the thing that knows what I want before any middle gets invoked. Or you can own the last inch: the thing that crosses the skin. Restaurants, pharma, beds, the hand on the shoulder, the room where the other primates are. Anything that can be pushed one hop further from the body is middle, and it should be priced like electricity because that is what it will become.

I run a product that is pure middle. Credit GPS is a credit score for people who just landed in Canada. Nothing about a credit score crosses the skin. It survives only because the chain it sits in ends in a key to an apartment and a car to drive to work, and the day something shorter gets a newcomer to that key, my middle is gone. I think that is the right way to look at every product right now. Specify the two ends precisely. Treat everything between them as a commodity you should not be proud of building.

The counterarguments

One of the counterarguments to be made is that AI gets its own bookends. Agents with their own objectives, trading with each other, wanting things. I take this one seriously because I have argued for it: agentic commerce is not real until an agent sets its own objective with no human in the loop, and I am waiting for the day one agent rents its spare resources to another agent because it worked out on its own that it needed more. When that day comes there are two economies. One is bracketed by bodies. The other is bracketed by whatever agents turn out to want, and I cannot name a single thing an agent would need that only a body can give. That is the point. The second economy does not replace our middle. It stops needing our ends. It runs beside us, and mine does not shrink, it just stops being the only one. Whether that is the end of the human story or a very large neighbour is a different post.

The other counterargument is that the ends get thinner. Appetite can be manufactured. The feed already does it, and a middle that learns to generate the want is a middle that owns a bookend. I think this is right, it is already happening, and it is the one I would bet on before agent economies. The body end is harder to counterfeit. You cannot stream calories. You cannot download a night of sleep. The last inch holds.

What to watch

Three signals. Pricing that moves past tokens and past decisions to bodies: per meal, per night slept, per patient treated, per person who showed up. Which businesses re-rate: anything that touches skin holding its margin while anything one hop out gets electricity margins. And the first trade between two agents with no human at either end, which is the day the second economy opens.

The middle is going to get very smart. It still has to hand the plate to someone with a mouth.