About

About This Project

The Depth Deficit is an independent research project run by a small group of researchers, practitioners and educators. We come from different fields — procurement, technology, organizational practice, education — and we share one conviction: that the most important question about artificial intelligence is not which jobs it replaces, but what it does to the people who use it.

The argument, stated compactly: judgment, taste, attention, patience, originality and presence become more valuable as AI becomes more capable, not less — because whatever the machines make abundant cannot, by definition, be what differentiates anyone. The scarcity moves. And the capacities it moves toward are precisely the ones that quietly stop developing when the work that used to build them is delegated.

The project exists in three parts. This text, published in full and free. The Depth Deficit Index, a structured self-assessment that turns the argument into a number you can track across quarters. And a body of continuing work — because a project about staying current has no business being a static document. Where the research moves, these pages move with it.

We publish under the project's name rather than our own. The argument should be judged on its evidence. Every claim is anchored to named research or documented public record. Every contested finding is flagged as contested — including the four sources in the evidence base that cut against the thesis.

Individual contributors will be identified in due course, when the time is right for each. In the meantime, the work is the introduction.

"The future doesn't belong to the most automated.
It belongs to the most human."