Here’s what actually makes you irreplaceable | Carnegie Mellon University Po-Shen Loh | EO

AI took creativity, so thoughtfulness is now the human edge

Po-Shen Loh argues that AI has taken the human edge of creativity, leaving thoughtfulness as the thing to build on. He stopped calling creativity AI-proof after Google's model solved four of six original International Math Olympiad problems, and he warns that students who let AI write their homework skip the exercise that builds logic. What remains scarce is wanting to create value for other people, since only those who delight others get chosen as partners. That is why he has teenagers coach children and wants a network of kind, clever people.

Takeaways

• AI ended creativity as the human edge. Loh used to tell audiences that creativity was the one thing AI could not do. He stopped after Google's artificial intelligence solved four of the six deliberately original International Math Olympiad problems, and he says machine creativity can probably surpass what humans do.
• Letting AI write homework skips the training. He compares it to driving a mile instead of running it, which gives no exercise at all. Language, reading, writing, communication and logic will matter more for the next generation, and math is taught to make people smarter rather than to teach algebra.
• Only people who create value get partners. Humans will not be the most capable things on the planet and will have to team up. The partners chosen will be those who genuinely want to create value and delight other people, and solving a problem requires seeing it through the other person's eyes.
• Making others happy beats outdoing them. As national coach of the US Olympic math team he met clever, capable students who were depressed and had no plan after high school, because they thought life was about proving superiority. Making other people happy is addictive and correlates with conventional success.
• Four AI providers are an unhealthy menu. Loh reads cnn.com and Fox News and tunes one social feed to right-leaning views and another to left-leaning ones. Claude, OpenAI, Gemini and DeepSeek are few against seven and a half billion viewpoints, and people who lose reasoning are easier to deceive.
• Social enterprises should profit on every person helped. Loh says a good social enterprise makes a net profit on every single person it helps. His paid after-school math classes for middle schoolers subsidize students elsewhere, and he tells founders to find who pays the cost of the problem today.

How LIVE teaches critical thinking

• High schoolers aged 15 to 18 coach children aged 10 to 13, and they always teach in pairs, which makes the classes more fun and lets the teenagers get to know each other.