Definition

Elevator Operator Principle

A mental model for distinguishing human roles that add genuine judgment value from roles that exist only because the technology to automate them had not yet arrived. Before automatic elevators, buildings employed human operators to run elevator cars. When automatic elevators arrived, those jobs disappeared - not because the workers were incompetent but because the role itself was a placeholder for automation. Brennan applies this to hiring decisions in the AI era: any job description that could have been written identically in 2019 is a candidate for being an elevator operator role. Good headcount augments human judgment with AI leverage (one specialist doing the work of ten). Bad headcount is a human performing a task that AI can now do - a position that will be automated away as AI capabilities continue to improve, making it a capital efficiency mistake to build headcount around.

From the episode “He Built 10 AI Companies in 12 Months with Teams of Five”

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He Built 10 AI Companies in 12 Months with Teams of Five

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