What a 2,400-Year-Old Robot Teaches Us About Surviving the AI Age
8 min read If AI can draft your proposals, plan your holidays and summarise your emails, what exactly are you still for? In this post, we explore what a 4th-century BCE Daoist text reveals about the limits of artificial intelligence — and why your most irreplaceable qualities are precisely the ones that cannot be coded. The anxiety is real, and it is spreading. According to Resume Now's 2026 AI & Job Security Outlook Report, more than half of surveyed employees fear automation threatens their livelihoods. Researchers at MIT have identified ' cognitive debt ' which is the phenomenon where outsourcing your thinking to AI gradually erodes your critical thinking and long-term memory. The question is not whether AI is changing work. It is. The question is: what do you have that AI cannot replicate? Interestingly, a 4th-century BCE Daoist text called the Liezi contains what might be the world's first science fiction story, written precisely to explore this question. T...