THE BOOK
What Must Stay Human
An operator's field guide to the one decision you can never hand to a machine
All profits from this book are donated.
The argument
There is exactly one decision you can never hand to a machine: the decision of what to hand to a machine.
Most leadership books on AI ship a list of decisions to keep human. Every one of those lists is an expiring asset. A model that could not hold a customer conversation in January runs one end to end by July, and the list you wrote in the spring is already wrong.
This book replaces the list with a test you re-run on a schedule.
What you get
The Blast-Radius Gate
Score any decision on three axes before you automate it: reversibility, bounded downside, traceable accountability. Clear all three or it stays with a human.
Keep, Augment, Automate
The three-bucket triage you can run on a whiteboard with your team this afternoon.
Graduated Trust
Autonomy is a promotion system, not a switch. Machines earn scope on performance, inside an envelope, reviewed and logged.
The Additive Test
Most human-in-the-loop steps are theater. One question tells you which of yours are real.
The Last Decision Cadence
A ninety-minute quarterly session that outputs one page, with a worked example and a blank template in the appendix.
The correction
Leaders sort decisions by how they feel. Emotional calls get protected, analytical calls get waved through to automation. That instinct is backward. A pricing algorithm wrong for six weeks does irreversible damage. A hard conversation run badly is recoverable. Blast radius is the axis that matters.
Who it is for
Operators. Executives, function leads and founders who have to live with what they decide by Monday.
Every part ends with an exercise, and the interactive versions live here.
You will need the code from the back of the book.
Field notes from the cadence run in public
I run the cadence on myself and publish what it costs as well as what it returns. Leave an email and you get those field notes, plus first word on new writing. Nothing else.